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THE REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHIST BOWLING LEAGUE
DO YOU KNOW ME?
Most people don’t.
That’s why I carry one of these [bowling balls]. The power of this little piece of plastic is recognized in Banks, Military Recruiting Stations, and Fine Dining Establishments around the world.
BOWLER’S EXPRESS from RABL.
- The RABL Rouser
Gordon Edgar:
I thought it was kind of funny, both in terms of the bowling ball being the symbol of what you break the recruiting windows with, and the whole organization being called the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League.
I liked all the rhetoric they had about bowling and the heartland; taking American values, basically –they wouldn’t have used those words, but that’s what they were playing with.
Whitney Clark:
There was always a bit of a divide. Because—by-and-large—RABL was not a bunch of pacifists. We always used to say (mostly jokingly) “Let’s put the ‘fist’ back in ‘pacifist.’”
That caused some uneasiness. Because the older, completely nonviolent, peaceniks were always worried that RABL were going to do something provocative. And their perspective was that this would attract the wrong kind of attention; that it would draw attention away from the issue, and onto our tactics.
And our approach was: we’re pissed off, and we want people to know that. This is NOT acceptable. We’re going to raise the cost. We also thought that the cost [of destroying public and private property] was nothing compared the damage that’s being inflicted on the people of South Africa or Guatemala and Honduras.
FIGHTING ANARCHISTS?
This group of people wanted to see a fighting anarchist movement, and had no ideological problems with violence…(38)
-Kieran Frazier Knutson, The Blast!
No one would dispute the fact that “the anarchists” had a bad reputation.
But did RABL really envision itself as a “fighting anarchist movement”?
Whitney Clark:
Well, Kieran did!
And you know, at the beginning of RABL, Kieran was a kid. He was, like, 16. He was a student from South High who was smart, and very mature for a teenager.
I think there’s always going to be people who talk big, and want to raise the stakes. And it depends on what you mean [by fighting]. RABL was thought of as being edgier, "Sharp and lively" as we used to call it. There would be theater, there’d be damage to property (on a regular basis), combined with smart messages.
The rhetoric was always “Smash the State.” Like: Why shouldn’t we dismantle the apparatus of the State? Why is this legitimate? If they’re using violence to accomplish their means, why shouldn’t we employ violence and more combative tactics in the service of freedom and justice?
So there’d be statements made, by various people, that sort of inched towards [advocating violence]. And certainly, there were divisions within the anarchist movement between the ones who wanted to fight, and the ones who simply wanted to make a statement (or bear witness). There were people who simply liked the theater, and the flashier civil disobedience, but they didn’t want to hurt anybody.
I don’t think there were very many anarchists who thought that it would be OK to hurt other people. But then there was Anti-Racist Action—the anti-racist skinheads—and Kieran was one of those guys. And their whole thing was [violently confronting the Nazis].
As I think about it now, I realize that there’s a certain hormonal component to this.
When you’re eighteen, you want to get your ya-ya’s out. You feel passionately about racism and social justice, so it was a natural thing to decide that: “We’re going to fight with Nazi skinheads. We’re going to seek them out, and that’s going to be our thing –we’re going to be ‘soldiers for righteousness.’”
Kieran went off on that path. And people kind of tolerated and even admired that kind of thing.
I was a young man at that time, with my share of hormones, so I felt like that was a strategy that I could accept. Why not beat the shit out of some Nazis? --You know?-- They deserve it!
I don’t know if it was an important tactical component of the movement. I don’t know how much it added. I think that the lively, humorous spirit of anger and righteous indignation –as well as impishness and fun—that was the genius of RABL. We had a sense of humor. We didn’t take ourselves too seriously. Which isn’t to say that we didn’t believe in what we were saying.
Kieran’s desire to mold the anti-racist skinheads—the Baldies—into a fighting force would ultimately prove to be the downfall of the Back Room Anarchist Center. In late-1987, the cultural radicals organized an emergency meeting at the bookstore, during which the Baldies were denounced. RABL sided with the Baldies, and the collective split apart.
ANARCHY INCONTINENT
Beginning in 1986 (the hundred-year anniversary of the Haymarket Riot), the nascent North American anarchist movement held four annual continental “convergences.” The first was the “Haymarket International Anarchist Gathering” in Chicago, IL, followed by the 1987 “Building the Movement” conference in Minneapolis, MN, and the 1988 “Anarchist Survival Gathering” in Toronto, Ontario. The final convergence—the 1989 “Without Borders” gathering—drew 2,000 people to the streets of San Francisco, causing major logistical problems for organizers. After this, a decision was made hold smaller, regional conferences instead.(39)
There isn’t a city with an anarchist community large enough to put up 2,000 guests for a week without seriously disrupting other political activities.(40)
- Chris Gunderson, Artpaper
Joe Hart:
We went up to Toronto. In a lot of ways, it was really great. A whole tribe of like-minded people coming together and giving each other strokes.
The Toronto Survival Gathering, which took place from July 1-4, 1988, was held at the 519 Church Street community center, a government-owned building. This caused no small amount of consternation at City Hall. Toronto Mayor Art Eggleton ordered an official inquiry, “…to determine how the anarchists got the use of the city community center in the first place.”(41) Eight hundred anarchists showed up for the convention (though several were turned-back at the U.S.-Canadian border, and two were deported).(42) Already banned in Canada, the American punk band MDC snuck across the border through an Indian reservation, crossing the St. Lawrence River in a boat.(43)
Circulars inviting anarchists from across North America and around the world to Metro say it all: “Bring bail money.”(44)
- The Toronto Star, July 2, 1988
I rode up there with Mike Gunderloy, editor of Factsheet Five…
Mike planned to distribute a leaflet from some Chicago Anarchists. They didn't like the way things were run at the convention. They objected to senseless "death-demonstrations" that trashed things for no reason. They said that the organizers spend time raising money for food and future meetings and all of it winds up being used for bail.(45)
- Mykel Board, Maximumrocknroll
Though the anarchists obeyed the city’s indoor smoking ban, a fight broke out when local Trotskyites demanded the right to sell “their tedious newspapers” inside of the convention.(46) Similar conflicts over the right to disagree sprang up throughout the weekend, as peer pressure and groupthink vied with the concept of personal freedom.
Thirty-one people were arrested on the July 4th Day of Action, when 150 anarchists (and dozens of sympathizers) marched to the U.S. Consulate to protest the downing of a civilian aircraft.(47) (On July 3, 1988, a heat-seeking missile fired from the USS Vincennes struck Iranian Air Flight 655. All 290 people on board were killed.)(48) At the arraignment hearing, fifteen demonstrators were found to have entered the Canada illegally. They were told to leave the country immediately, “or face measures under the Immigration Act that would label them as part of an ‘inadmissible class.’”(49) All had pending criminal charges, ranging from “escaping custody” to “assaulting police.”(50)
Gordon Edgar:
In 1988, I went to Toronto for the Anarchist Survival Gathering. And then in 1989, I went to the one in San Francisco –Without Borders. And those were amazing things.
The one in Toronto was kind of an eye-opener. I came back from it thinking: These people are amazing! There’s so many smart people here. There’s so many people who are doing incredible stuff with their lives or their activism or their politics…! I planned to move back to the Bay Area to be there in time for the San Francisco gathering in 1989.
I had an idea that you would go to an anarchist convention, and it would be nothing but “No State! No government!” But there were all these workshops about what we would now call DIY –teaching and skill-sharing. Teaching people skills like composting and organic gardening, or pirate radio…
I was kind of workshop-hopping (because I felt like I had so much to learn). I went to a prison activist workshop that really blew my mind, ‘cause I hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought before then.
But beyond that, I was excited to be building ties to other people who were there. I was introduced to people from all these different cities.
Joe Hart:
Ironically, for all that the punk scene is explicitly about nonconformity, underneath that, as a kind of a folk-group, there’s a lot of conformity [within punk]. It’s pretty easy to tell who’s “in” and who’s “out.” And that makes it a safe refuge for people who have come through traumatic times in adolescence. It’s hardcore, but you know that if you are hardcore, too, and if you follow the code, then you’re going to be accepted.
So to have this huge group of people all coming together felt pretty supportive
Gordon Edgar:
I wasn’t looking so much for the anarchist punk bands. I didn’t actually care as much about that…
That was always a tension at those conferences. I would say that most people there had had some ties to the punk rock scene. But most of the people weren’t there as “punk rockers.”
Joel Olson is an assistant professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University, and a former member of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. He is the author of The Abolition of White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press).
Joe Olson:
Subcultural politics is a huge problem. It limits the effectiveness. It’s supposed to be a movement, not a milieu. Not a subculture.
If you look at places like the Bay Area, where it’s the easiest place in the goddamned world to be a revolutionary, but also the most pointless place to be a revolutionary, because, essentially, being Left is an entrée into certain scenes… to hang out, to have fun, to drink beer…
And it’s great! It’s wonderful. But there’s no politics coming out. There’s no struggle. There’s no working class base. And, to the extent that there is a base [in the Bay Area] that’s in struggle—like the black community in Oakland—the fucking left is pushing them out! Because they can’t afford to live in the city! So now they’ve moved to Oakland, and they’ve gentrified it.
Gordon Edgar:
It’s a funny thing, but what the hell else are you gonna do? If you grow up in the 80’s with Reagan, you’re going to look into punk rock –even if it’s not for you! If you’re in certain demographics, you’re gonna think: “Oh, maybe this punk rock thing is where I want to be.” Because it was one of the only visible anti-Reagan options out there. And it wasvery visiblyanti-Reagan!
So it makes sense that most of the people [at the Toronto Survival Gathering] had at least some familiarity with punk. But I don’t think that most of the people at the convention were live-and-die with the punk scene. In fact, most people were trying to see a world beyond that.
Joel Olson:
If politics is a way to make friends, you should make friends. But it should also be a way of building movements and connecting with a constituency. And subcultures, by definition, don’t build a constituency. If you compare what the Civil Rights Movement did, with what the Left does now, you can see that it’s two very different tasks. And I’d much rather follow the path of the Civil Rights Movement.
THE ATTACK ON THE COKE TRUCK
In San Francisco, California, 2,000 people took part in the final anarchist gathering, which was held at the Horace Mann Middle School in 1989. The five day conference included workshops on animal liberation, child rearing, sex work, computer hackers,(51) “Countering Electronic Surveillance,” “Slaying Christ,” and “How to Spot a Leninist at 20 Yards.”(52)
Bill Somers, a classical clarinetist with the Grand Rapids Symphony, was sitting in the auditorium with his traveling companion, Josh Ahsoak, 10. They had come here from Michigan with Josh's mother, who was in Oakland with a group of anarchist women.
"We're definitely against a lot of authoritarian trips," Somers said. He pointed at Josh. "He doesn't go to school."(53)
- The San Francisco Chronicle, July 20, 1989
Inspired by the July 14th arrest of Keith McHenry, who was jailed for feeding the homeless without a permit,(54) convention-goers threw an illegal picnic for the homeless on July 26th, “followed by a chanting march through the Federal Building, where play money was burned."(55)
Arriving in Berkeley on the BART train, 250 anarchists attempted to seize control of the Berkeley Inn, “a fire gutted hotel,”(56) which they hoped to convert into a homeless shelter. The Berkeley Police Department had other ideas.(57)
The masked and crudely armed Day of Action demonstration marked a departure from those held in conjunction with past gatherings. Wielding slingshots, cans of soda pop, sticks and crowbars, this crowd was better prepared to defend itself.(58)
- Chris Gunderson, Artpaper
Frustrated by their inability to commandeer the hotel, the conventioneers marched down Telegraph Avenue, leaving a trail of broken windows and burning tires in their wake, “for the third time in ten weeks.”(59) At the corner of Haste Street, someone lobbed a brick through the window of a passing Coca-Cola delivery truck.(60) The driver fled, leaving the keys in the ignition.(61)
Screaming “Catch the Wave!” the rioters tore the truck apart. The contents were stolen, and hundreds of bottles were smashed,(62) as were the remaining windows and the engine. The truck was abandoned in the middle of the intersection.
Gordon Edgar:
That was just embarrassing! (Laughs.) I’m really happy to say that I was not there when the Coke truck was “liberated.”
There was always a real tension at those gatherings—because you’d have all these amazing workshops; time to meet people and go to see shows—and then, at the end, there was always this direct action that you were all leading up to, that on some level was kind of anti-climactic. Certainly, the Coke truck was anti-climactic.
But it took a lot of resources to do those demos, because you’d always get a ton of people arrested! And then you’d have to do prison support, and raise money to get people out. So there was always a critique within the conference itself about whether-or-not to do the Day of Action, and what it should be.
And I do believe that on that particular day, there was something of a split. Because a bunch of people went and decided to attack a Coke truck –which was totally by accident! They were marching down Telegraph, and just happened to run into a Coke truck and took advantage of the situation.
In any case, there were people who wanted to do a militant demonstration on Telegraph. And at the very same time, a whole ‘nother group of people were creating a community garden. They were planting trees, and planting organic plants, and building an irrigation system.
It was definitely a big divide within the movement itself, because of course, attacking the Coke truck is what everyone remembers from the Day of Action. Which is really kind of sad!
On one level, it has a certain symbolic value. On another level, it’s like: the Coke truck is not the real enemy. A lot of the people I knew were real bummed-out. It just seemed like such waste. Sure, it’s Coke, but destroying any kind of foodstuff is a waste of resources, on some level, even if it’s only symbolic.
It certainly got portrayed as exceptionally violent, even though, really, the only thing that got hurt was Coke bottles.
It just wasn’t representative of what was going on at the conference, in terms of building community. Building a community of resistance is a much bigger issue than an individual Coke truck. Not that Coke isn’t evil!
It didn’t sum up what I felt about the conference. And yet, that was what ended up being talked about afterwards.
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