Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century

Pacifism, Nonviolence, andthe Reinvention of AnarchistTactics in the TwentiethCentury

How much better is “propaganda by deed” when it is against bombs instead of

with them?

—Nicolas Walter

The years during and after World War II saw a remarkableevolution in anarchist views on violence. While earlier generationsof anarchists had assumed that violence would, in one way or

another, factor into the revolutionary struggle, those who identified asanarchists in the first two decades after the war in Britain and the UnitedStates were far more likely to adopt nonviolence as an almost defaultposition. Anarchists were among those who pioneered the use ofnonviolent resistance in the British and American contexts, and anarchistideas exerted a strong influence within the postwar anti-nuclearmovement, which in its most radical manifestations situated itsopposition to nuclear weapons within a broader opposition to war,militarism, and violence of all kinds. Although few postwar anarchists

BENJAMIN J. PAULI

Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2015, pp. 61–94. ISSN 1930-1189© 2015 Michigan State University. All rights reserved. 61

were absolutists on the question of nonviolence, their change of emphasis

helped to transform the way that social change was conceptualized in

anarchist thought. Part of what contributed to this evolution was the

introduction of new ideas from outside the anarchist tradition,

particularly the Gandhian idea of “revolutionary nonviolence.” But as this

article will show, the embrace of revolutionary nonviolence went hand in

hand with the reimagining of anarchist tactics—like “propaganda of the

deed” and “direct action”—that were once closely associated with

violence. The emergence of the doctrine of anarcho-pacifism out of this

mixture was perhaps the most important development within twentieth-

century anarchism, transforming the way anarchist thinkers conceived of

the relationship between means and ends.

The shift in anarchist views on violence is all the more extraordinary

when one considers that shortly before the outbreak of World War II,

anarchists from around the world were united in support of a violent

struggle. The outbreak of civil war in Spain on 19 July 1936 triggered a call

to arms that had anarchists rushing to the defense of the Republic against

Franco and fascism. Within Spain itself, an alliance of trade unions and

popular militias formed a defensive front that scored impressive victories

early on in the conflict, like the defense of Madrid in November of 1936.

The popular character of the resistance was one reason why the

Spanish Civil War was, as George Orwell observed, perceived as “a

left-wing war.”1 It was a conflict even the most romantic of

intellectuals could embrace, a battle between socialist idealism and

belligerent reaction, as epitomized by the neofeudalism of Franco and

his allies. Although the Comintern gradually extended its influence

within the resistance, steering it toward Stalinist objectives, early on

that resistance was strikingly organic and democratic, never more so

than in the popular militias that Orwell himself described so

memorably in Homage to Catalonia. Furthermore, in northeastern

Spain, where these militias were strongest, anarcho-syndicalists

initiated an extraordinary period of libertarian experimentation,

which saw factories taken over by their workers and property

collectivized in popularly controlled communes. From the anarchists’

perspective, the civil war had become a revolution, and to fight that war

62 Benjamin J. Pauli

was to fight both against fascism and for anarchism simultaneously.

Rarely had social idealism and violent struggle coexisted so comfortably.

The struggle, of course, was a failure: the anarchist insurrection was

crushed when the Communists turned their guns on their erstwhile

allies in May of 1937, and by the end of March 1939, the Communists

themselves had been overrun by the fascists. When the next fight against

fascism was launched, it could hardly have made for a sharper contrast

with the halcyon days of the Spanish campaign. The left-wing intellectuals

who envisioned “a sort of enlarged version of the war in Spain,” Orwell

remarked, were confronted with a very different beast indeed, “an all-in

modern war fought mainly by technical experts . . . and conducted by

people who are patriotic according to their lights but entirely reactionary

in outlook.”2 It was a campaign directed, in the West at least, by the two

preeminent representatives of the capitalist world order: Britain and the

United States. In both of those countries, the war effort was orchestrated

from above by state bureaucrats, who tightly managed the mobilization of

domestic resources on an extraordinary scale. Many anarchists, though

antifascist as ever, found that they could sympathize neither with those

running the war nor with the means that were being used to fight it. Some

argued that the political logic was different from that which prevailed

during the Spanish conflict: to support the war effort against the Axis

powers was not to further but to imperil the anarchist cause, for it meant

legitimating both the capitalist overlords holding the reins and the

domestic state apparatus they were inflating beyond all precedent. Ever

cognizant of the anarchist maxim that the state does not readily cede back

power it has acquired, anarchists like Marie Louise Berneri warned that

the “total” state that was arising as a means of waging “total” war would

persist into the postwar era.3

Furthermore, as citizens were exhorted to rally behind their respective

flags, “the principle of obedience to authority” was being “enormously

strengthened.”4 That principle would be illustrated most vividly after the

war during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who provided, as George

Woodcock put it, “the negative justification of Civil Disobedience” by

demonstrating the terrible consequences of elevating obedience and

conformity over morality and responsibility.5 Indeed, for anarchists it was

the loss of a sense of responsibility above all that was manifest in the

Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 63

bureaucratic organization of mass destruction, the gratuitous atrocities

committed by both the Axis and Allied powers, and the failure of the vast

majority of the citizenry to voice any protest. The nihilism that

characterized the behavior of state elites, anarchists like Alex Comfort

warned, was beginning to seep into the population, eroding any sense of

tension between the actions of the state and the moral imperatives of the

individual. This was, in many ways, the most troubling fact of all, for

fascism had been built not solely— or even mostly— on the basis of a

powerful centralized state but on the acquiescence of the public at large.

On the surface, the objections raised by British and American

anarchists to World War II were similar to objections that anarchists had

always raised to wars waged by capitalist powers. Anarchists had been

consistently skeptical of official rationales for conflagrations involving

self-interested nation-states and had long believed, as the American

intellectual Randolph Bourne put it during the First World War, that “war

is the health of the state.” But coming off the defeat of the Spanish

resistance, anarchists had special reason to wonder about the efficacy, and

the consequences, of violent struggle in any conceivable modern context.

Modern war, by all appearances, was inherently “antithetical to libertarian

principles,” and anarchists were, it seemed, incapable of competing on the

level of violence anyway.6 This was the context that lent plausibility to the

idea of “anarcho-pacifism.” The term implied, first of all, that to resist

war, especially in its modern incarnation, was to resist the state, and vice

versa. That proposition was basically in keeping with anarchist attitudes

that had existed up to that point, though there was reason to emphasize it

even more strongly now that states were not only making war but growing

fatter off it than ever before. What was far more radical from an anarchist

perspective was the subsidiary implication of the term—namely, that

violent struggle of any kind, even on behalf of anarchism, was to be

eschewed in favor of nonviolent alternatives. To call oneself an “anarcho-

pacifist” did not necessarily connote an absolutist insistence upon

nonviolence. But there is no question that it communicated more than

simply an opposition to “capitalist” and “imperialist” wars, to invoke the

terminology that was sometimes used by anarchists. Rather, it signaled a

major shift in thinking about how the struggle for an anarchist society was

to be conducted.


Anarchists had reason, then, to take an interest in the idea of

revolutionary nonviolence that, thanks to Gandhi and his popularizers in

the West, caught the attention of the British and American Left in the

1930s. Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha held out the possibility of combining

the principle of nonviolence with tactics militant enough to generate real

social change. In the postwar context, anarcho-pacifists like Geoffrey

Ostergaard sought to show that the idea of nonviolence not only offered a

guide to reconciling principle and tactics but a vision of a society free of

all organized coercion. Gandhi’s innovation was to devise a new way of

integrating means and ends, gesturing even in the midst of targeted

struggles toward a social ideal virtually indistinguishable from anarchism.

Revolutionary nonviolence reflected the logic of what I will call

“prefigurative exemplarity.” It was “prefigurative” because it strove for the

fusion of is and ought in individual behavior and organizations that

anticipated in the present a future social order in which principle and

practice were reconciled. It was “exemplary” in that it sought to radiate its

influence outward through performative acts aimed at attracting attention

and inspiring imitation.

Anarchists, of course, were far from the only ones attracted to the idea

of revolutionary nonviolence. What made their appropriation of the

concept so interesting, however, was the way in which they were able to

demonstrate its affinity with anarchist tactics that had been closely linked

to violence historically. This required showing that the connection

between violence and ideas like “propaganda of the deed” and “direct

action” was contingent rather than integral, that a logic of social change

could be extracted from these ideas that could be allied with—in fact,

strengthened by—nonviolence. Indeed, the idea of revolutionary

nonviolence provided a missing link of sorts that allowed these tactics to

be successful on their own terms, for it imbued them with a compelling

dignity that commanded the respect of the masses and an efficacy that

violent resistance could never have had under the conditions created by

the modern state. Once anarchist militancy was conceptualized along

nonviolent lines, there arose the possibility of establishing consistency

between anarchism’s combative and constructive aspects. The attitude

anarcho-pacifism entailed encouraged greater receptivity not only to

forms of protest and civil disobedience that placed emphasis on principled


conduct and symbolic demonstration but also to prefigurative

experiments with libertarian education and alternative communities and

institutions— endeavors that had long interested anarchists but had too

often been obscured and sidelined by the movement’s reputation for

unconstructive violence.

In Britain and the United States a new generation of anarchists,

including figures like Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Nicolas Walter,

Geoffrey Ostergaard, David Thoreau Wieck, Dorothy Day, and Paul

Goodman, helped to give shape to the novel phenomenon of anarcho-

pacifism in both theory and practice during and after World War II.

During the war years, anarcho-pacifists could only dream of the kind of

nonviolent movement Gandhi had helped to create in India. They began

by bringing the logic of prefigurative exemplarity down to the individual

level, stressing the importance of individual acts of principled refusal and

resistance— or what Paul Goodman called “drawing the line”—and the

power of “deeds” undertaken on even the smallest of scales to exert a

radiant influence. Thus, anarcho-pacifists could imagine how the quixotic

conscientious objection of the war years might eventually snowball into

collective resistance. The persistence of committed individuals and small

groups, they hoped, would ultimately transform popular consciousness,

generate mass opposition to war and injustice, and produce major

political change. Their optimism was validated not only by the rise of a

revivified pacifist movement in the 1950s but by the adoption by other

social movements, like the civil rights movement, of the tactics

championed and pioneered in Britain and the United States by radical

pacifists.7

Although most anarcho-pacifists were not nonviolent absolutists,

they understood that within modern states nonviolent strategies of

resistance, aside from allowing for ethical consistency, were quite

simply the only sensible and effective means of change imaginable.

This allowed them to mobilize the whole arsenal of anarchist strategies

for peaceful revolution— both combative and constructive—without

feeling like they were compromising a central insurrectionary struggle.

Their approach, they believed, was both a profounder and more

realistic expression of revolutionary ambition than those means—like

terrorism, parliamentarism, and proletarian dictatorship—that


contradicted the ends they were supposed to realize and, in practice,

never seemed to engender the promised results. Thus, with an

opportunity to contrast their perspective with the unprecedented

militarization of the “Warfare State,” and with the hope of retooling

traditionally anarchist tactics to make them more consistent and effective,

British and American anarchists forged a new vision of anarchism during

and after World War II that made the tradition freshly relevant to a new

generation of activists and political thinkers. In what follows, I will show

(1) why anarcho-pacifists were able to separate out the logic of anarchist

tactics from their historical association with violence, (2) how anarcho-

pacifists conceived of small-scale resistance being linked to large-scale

change, and (3) how anarcho-pacifists united theory and practice in the

context of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Anarchism, Violence, and Propaganda of the Deed

Given the anarchist movement’s later association with violence, it is

perhaps ironic that its emergence owed so much to the founding of an

international pacifist society. The League of Peace and Freedom, as that

society was called, represented “the first attempt to marshal what may be

called international public opinion for the creation of a war-proof

‘collective system’ of international life.”8 In terms that anarchists of the

1940s could have appreciated, the participants who traveled to Geneva in

September 1867 for the first Congress of the League called for a “United

States of Europe” that would put an end to war among the European

powers and establish the reign of “liberty, justice, and peace” on the

continent.9 The problem was that the attendees were unable, given their

disparate political sensibilities, to agree upon how those objectives were to

be effected. During the League’s Congress in Bern the following year,

Mikhail Bakunin attempted to steer the group in a libertarian direction,

urging fellow attendees to accept that the emancipation of workers and

the equalization of classes were essential prerequisites to peace. When his

proposed resolution to that effect was rejected overwhelmingly, Bakunin

left the League for friendlier pastures, transplanting the germ of the

international anarchist movement to the International Workingmen’s

Association, which, under the direction of Marx, had steered clear of the


League from the beginning. Marx’s basic objection to the League was

essentially the same as that which had prompted Bakunin to abandon it:

its refusal to acknowledge that international peace was impossible without

social revolution. That proposition, aside from being too radical for many

of the League’s supporters, sat uncomfortably with the “Peace Windbags”

(as Marx liked to call them) because it implied that violent struggle in one

form or another would be necessary, even if peace was the ultimate

objective.10 Peace, Marx believed, was to be understood not as a guiding

principle but as the historical outcome of a particular kind of war—the

“class war.”

Bakunin might not have employed Marx’s terminology, but he, like

Marx and most revolutionaries of their generation, assumed that

revolutions were made—if not wholly, at least partially—through

violence. It was difficult to imagine a scenario in which the owners of the

means of production would abjure their private property voluntarily or

(for Bakunin more so than Marx) in which the state would willingly

dissolve its power. There was no general consensus on what form

revolutionary violence would take—surely it would depend greatly upon

particular circumstances and considerations— but the vision of revolution

that fired Bakunin’s imagination was predicated on the outbreak of local

insurrections. These insurrections, would, he believed, spark a general

uprising among those in the lowest rungs of society, whose innate

dissatisfaction with the status quo would be transmuted into

revolutionary fervor as soon as the oppressive regimes that ruled over

them had been delegitimized and destabilized.

In the idea that small-scale insurrections—prompted (more than

likely) by a handful of plucky revolutionaries—would snowball into a

large-scale uprising, one can begin to discern the logic of what would

come to be called “propaganda of the deed.”11 In its original form, the

concept was inspired by the example of the most celebrated insurrection

of the nineteenth century, the Paris Commune of 1871, when Parisians

took advantage of the disorder caused by the Franco-Prussian War to

declare the municipality autonomous and revolutionize its system of

government. Although the eventual defeat of the Commune had

devastating consequences for much of the radical Left throughout Europe,

its memory was still strong enough to serve as the main point of reference


for the French anarchist Paul Brousse, who, writing in 1873, was the first to

articulate the idea of propaganda of the deed in any detail. Brousse

“envisioned the establishment of communes in cities throughout Europe”

that would act as beacons of revolution, inspiring “local demonstrations,

insurrections, and other forms of collective direct action” elsewhere.12 It

was clear to most would-be revolutionaries after the fall of Paris, however,

that insurrection was increasingly ill suited to urban environments, as

militaries developed more powerful weaponry and governments learned

to structure urban space so as to erect structural impediments to

sustained collective resistance. This explains, perhaps, why Errico

Malatesta, operating in the relatively backward country of Italy, became

the figure most closely associated with the theory and practice of

propaganda of the deed during its insurrectionary phase. In 1877 in the

Italian province of Benevento, Malatesta offered the world a paradigmatic

example of propaganda of the deed. Accompanied by Carlo Cafiero, the

Russian anarchist Sergei Stepniak, and a band of fellow revolutionaries, he

entered the town of Letino “on a Sunday morning, declared King Victor

Emanuel deposed and carried out the anarchist ritual of burning the

archives which contained the record of property holdings, debts and

taxes.”13 Although the locals initially supported the insurgents, who were

able to spread their insurrection to the nearby town of Gallo, government

troops soon reclaimed the liberated territory.

When Malatesta’s revolt was stymied prematurely, it was merely one in

a long line of similar failures. But one of the most attractive aspects of the

notion of propaganda of the deed was precisely its ability to accommodate

failure. To understand why, it is necessary to tease out the underlying

logic of the idea, as Brousse and others conceptualized it. Propaganda of

the deed, it was argued, was often more effective than traditional

propaganda (i.e., propaganda of the written word) because the best way of

directing popular attention and sympathy toward radical ideas was to

dramatize them in action. Propaganda of the deed sought to render

abstract concepts and ideals concrete, enabling everyday people to

confront them in a tactile, empirical way. Carrying out propagandistic

actions was a practical means of communicating with people who were

unable (because of illiteracy or other limitations) or unwilling to absorb


ideas in written form. Even if an action failed to attain its stated goals, it

could still have an educative effect.

Insofar as propaganda of the deed was interpreted to mean

insurrection, it was assumed to entail certain kinds of violent and illegal

behavior. But the concept was not innately violent at base. Brousse, for

example, cited as illustrations of the concept not only Malatesta’s abortive

rebellion but his own insistence upon the provocative display of a red flag

during a workers’ demonstration in Bern. When early examples of

propaganda of the deed involved violence, it was as a component of a

larger struggle or symbolic display. As reaction set into most European

countries in the late 1870s and 1880s, however, there were fewer

opportunities either for collective uprising or for peaceful demonstration.

Radicals impatient for revolution began to channel their energies into ever

narrower and more individualistic acts of revolt. Group insurrection

gradually condensed into isolated cadres of clandestine conspirators and

finally into the lone revolutionary wolf, whose plans might not be known

to any but himself. So began an era of spectacular assassinations—the

high point, perhaps, being the dynamiting of Tsar Alexander II in March

1881. Anarchists were not responsible for that particular success, but in the

same year the breakaway Bakuninist faction of the First International

officially endorsed such tactics, urging anarchists to educate themselves in

the latest methods of bomb making.14 Violence was moving from the

margins to the center of propaganda of the deed, for it provided the most

obvious means by which an individual or small group of conspirators

could create a big impact. When directed at people like tsars, kings,

presidents, and police captains, violence of this sort not only garnered

attention for the revolutionary cause but took the fight straight to those in

the upper echelons of the political elite who were usually insulated from

the consequences of the suffering they inflicted upon others.

With the invention and proliferation of dynamite, which became the

subject of appreciative odes in anarchist newspapers, it became possible

for individuals to exact significant damage, undermining (so they

believed) the state’s monopoly of the means of coercion.15 To privilege

violent and illegal tactics that were within the grasp of even the isolated

individual, however, was to invite the participation of any degenerate,

discontented social outcast who fancied himself a revolutionary. The line


began to blur between idealistic freedom fighter and common criminal.

Ravachol, whose myriad nefarious deeds included grave robbery and the

murder of a miserly hermit, became the archetype of the revolutionary

dynamiter after carrying out attacks on a judge and prosecuting attorney

who had been involved in the conviction of several anarchists; his name,

in fact, was converted into a verb (ravacholier) that became synonymous

for a time with “to dynamite.” Even more significant was the vanishing

distinction between revolutionary activity and outright terrorism, as seen

in the shift toward indiscriminate targets—a shift exemplified by Émile

Henry’s casual bombing of a busy café in Paris in February 1894. At his

trial, Henry, like other dynamiters of the time, exuded the hardened

revolutionism that had become a substitute for humanity, sneering at his

crippled victims and expressing no remorse for his actions.16

The smaller the scale of the “deeds” in question, the uglier the

consequences of the violence, and the more objectionable the perpetrators

responsible for them, the further this purportedly revolutionary activity

got from the original spirit of propaganda of the deed. Far from

awakening the masses to the injustice of the prevailing order and inspiring

them to revolt, these incidents gave rise to the caricature of the bomb-

wielding, amoral anarchist, devoid of either noble purposes or

constructive goals. This was an image that permeated culture both high—

from Dostoyevsky’s pseudo-Nechaev in Demons to Joseph Conrad’s

account in The Secret Agent of a failed bombing in London—and low, as

the seedy, nihilistic anarchist became a stock character of political

cartoonists and a familiar scapegoat in the popular consciousness. And as

“revolutionary” violence became more individualistic and detached from

the broader aims of a movement, it was carried out for pettier and pettier

motives. The actions of Ravachol and Henry were spurred mainly by the

desire to revenge fellow anarchists rather than any hopes of fomenting an

uprising. Even that justification, however, seemed to mask a deeper,

unacknowledged rationale: irrespective of its objective effects, a

spectacular, self-sacrificing act on the part of an individual could offer a

kind of subjective comfort, serving as a sign of revolutionary authenticity

when more constructive opportunities for effecting change were not

forthcoming. To employ violence coldly and ruthlessly, and to bring

violence upon oneself in the process (Ravachol and Henry, like others,


paid with their heads), was the ultimate proof of one’s revolutionary

mettle.

If the logic of inspirational exemplarity that informed the initial

formulations of propaganda of the deed survived at all in these actions, it

was now being stretched to the breaking point. Although figures like

Ravachol and Henry inspired some hero-worship within the anarchist

movement itself, they had only discredited the anarchist cause in the eyes

of the general public, sacrificing innocent lives in the bargain. Anarchist

intellectuals like Kropotkin now advised against such violence and

expressed remorse over the loss of life. But neither he nor anyone else in

the anarchist movement had yet solved the fundamental problem:

anarchists had not yet figured out how to behave under conditions in

which revolution was not imminent and could not be made imminent

through superhuman acts of will.

Direct Action and Revolutionary Nonviolence

The emergence of anarcho-syndicalism toward the end of the

nineteenth century, particularly in France, Spain, and Italy, offered

anarchists a new vehicle for revolutionary agitation, as well as new

concepts that would help to inform anarcho-pacifism. Conceived as

the radical alternative to trade unionism, anarcho-syndicalism

envisioned workingmen’s organizations as the seeds of a future society

and sought to unite workers not so that they could expend their energy on

measly struggles for short-term gains but so that they could strike when

the time was ripe and expropriate the expropriators in one grand

climactic showdown. This vision of revolution, which advocated the

conversion of unions into agents of revolutionary class struggle, was closer

to that of the Marxists in the sense that it cast the working class in the

central role, in contrast to earlier anarchists’ preference for peasants and

the lumpenproletariat. But unlike the Marxists, anarcho-syndicalists

rejected the idea that it was necessary for the working class to conquer the

state as a preliminary to taking control of industry, as well as the

increasingly popular belief that engaging in parliamentary politics was the

most viable way of furthering workers’ interests. Rather, they argued for

“direct action” within the economic realm itself, believing that if a


workers’ uprising was widespread enough, if it could balloon into a mass

strike that thoroughly paralyzed industrial operations, workers would be

able to take over the means of production directly and would be strong

enough to fend off their enemies. This, in effect, was the old theory of

insurrection dressed up to fit more modern, industrial conditions—it

relied on the same spontaneity, the same assumption that a powerful

example of revolt could spread the revolution like wildfire, and the same

apocalyptic faith that if only a determined act of revolutionary will would

set events into motion, the pieces of a total transformation of society

would somehow all fall into place.

Like the insurrectionists who preceded them, anarcho-syndicalists

tended to assume that violent means would be indispensable in a struggle

of this kind, if only to defend the gains made by workers. At their core,

however, the methods envisioned by anarcho-syndicalists were no more

innately violent than propaganda of the deed. In his influential The

Conquest of Violence, first published in English in 1937, the Dutch

anarchist Bart de Ligt argued that anarcho-syndicalist tactics could be put

in the service of a nonviolent revolutionary struggle. The general strike, he

wrote, “is in itself a way of action foreign to the traditional violent

methods.”17 Although most who embraced the idea of the general strike

assumed that it would involve violence at one point or another, it

represented an advance over certain insurrectionary tactics of the

nineteenth century, like the construction of defensive barricades in urban

areas and the progressive, forceful liberation of territory. The main aim of

the general strike was the stoppage of work so as to bring society to a

standstill and render its continued operation dependent upon the will of

the workers themselves. This pointed toward the logic of noncooperation

rather than the logic of violence, the idea that withdrawing from active

participation in the system on a large enough scale would be tantamount

to overthrowing it. De Ligt went so far as to hope that if the general strike

could be extended into the barracks as well as the factories, it would

neutralize the threat of military repression and obviate any need for

armed resistance. Noncooperation meshed nicely with the long-standing

anarchist belief that authority is propped up not, mainly, by guns but by

the voluntary obedience of those subject to it.18


De Ligt’s theory of nonviolent revolution rejected the notion of a zero-

sum conflict between diametrically opposed class enemies. It was

necessary, de Ligt wrote, for opponents of the status quo “to recognize the

moral values in the men and the social phenomena which they are obliged

by their convictions to combat.”19 Nonviolence aimed not at the

obliteration of the antagonist but at reconciliation, and it counseled

against oversimplified dichotomies that ruled out the possibility of finding

common ground. It did not, however, imply the complete absence of

conflict. De Ligt, like other pacifists of the time, was prone to using

language borrowed from the vocabulary of war: he urged his readers to

wage a “pacifist battle.”20 But to fight such a battle with violence, he

argued, was to create a dangerous rift between means and ends. “[E]very

end,” de Ligt wrote, “suggests its own means”; “freedom must be

awakened and stimulated by freedom and in freedom. It can never be

born of violence.”21 To use violence, especially given the destructiveness of

modern weapons, was to undermine one’s humanity, to make one not

more but less moral, to reduce one to the very barbarism one wished to

oppose. A free society, de Ligt believed, had to be created and sustained by

human beings operating on a higher moral plane, whose principles were

strengthened rather than compromised by struggle.

De Ligt was not the first anarchist to suggest that nonviolent means

both could and should lead the way to a peaceful, stateless society.

William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon— both of whom found

violent struggle of all stripes abhorrent— had in their early formulations

of anarchism as a political philosophy envisioned change coming about

through a protracted, nonviolent process. They had been plagued by their

own means-ends problem, however, for their opposition not only to

violence but to militancy of any kind left them few avenues through which

their radical ends might have been advanced. Godwin pictured coercive

social institutions dissolving with the gradual spread of enlightenment, as

exemplified by the dissemination of truth through polite conversation.

Proudhon thought that human relationships would be transformed along

the lines of mutuality through free contract and free credit (which is why

for Marx he was little more than a particularly idealistic bourgeois

economist). Like Godwin and Proudhon, de Ligt accepted that nonviolent

change would be a prolonged process, and in this sense he broke with one


of the main assumptions of the general strike. But de Ligt believed that

anarchists now had at their disposal methods that could hardly have been

anticipated by the revolutionaries of earlier generations, methods that

were “both new and truly worthy of men,” methods of militant

nonviolence.22

Those methods were pioneered, of course, by Mohandas Gandhi in

South Africa and India beginning around the turn of the century. By the

1930s, when de Ligt’s book appeared, Gandhi had been active for decades,

but his ideas were just starting to catch on with the Left in Britain and

America—thanks in no small part to their popularization by de Ligt and

other acolytes like Richard Gregg and Krishnalal Shridharani.23 Gandhi’s

innovation, as most Westerners understood it, was principally tactical. His

satyagraha was a method for disarming one’s enemies without using arms

oneself, of dismantling power and authority through noncooperation and

civil disobedience, a kind of “moral jiu-jitsu,” as Gregg put it. Gandhi’s

successes—the civil rights movement in South Africa, the campaign on

behalf of untouchables in Vykom, the Salt March—proved that it was

possible to put nonviolent tactics to use on a mass scale, to great effect.

This was an approach to social change that was without obvious precedent

in human history, and it was received as a kind of revelation.

The potency of Gandhi’s approach, and its symbolic impact in

particular, lay in its combination of principle and pragmatics. Gandhi

understood that the character and conduct of the nonviolent

revolutionary greatly impacted how the latter’s actions were received, and

he had personally shown that it was possible to subvert the social order

while simultaneously commanding respect and admiration. In Gandhi’s

case, the steadfast commitment to principle was no doubt authentic—

appearance, for the most part, was a reflection of reality. Nevertheless,

Gandhi’s actions evidenced his canny appreciation for the power of

spectacle, the ability of performative and dramatic behavior to catch and

hold the public’s attention. Although Gandhi placed great importance on

rational discourse and common understanding, he, like the advocates of

propaganda of the deed, understood that it was necessary to connect with

his audience more viscerally, through striking images of exemplary

conduct.


Anarchists had many reasons to be sympathetic to Gandhi’s

approach—its insistence upon adhering to the dictates of conscience over

and above obedience to authority, its tendency to privilege direct action

taken outside of official political channels, its anti-ideological, action-

oriented, experimental character. Furthermore, Gandhi’s conversion of

the ancient doctrine of ahimsa (“nonviolence” or “nonharm”) into a

social principle logically placed him at odds with the very idea of the state,

which, like Tolstoy, he saw as predicated on the law of violence rather

than the law of love.24 Even more significantly, the strategy of satyagraha

was, in his own mind, subordinated to the “Constructive Programme” of

sarvodaya, a program that bore a strong resemblance to anarchist ideas

about social organization. Gandhi’s promotion of village industry,

communal property, social regulation through moral authority rather

than coercion, and the confederal organization of village republics all

reflected that his “ideal society was a condition of enlightened anarchy.”25

In practice, Gandhi made some puzzling compromises that troubled

his admirers, and many British and American pacifists took issue with his

asceticism and (avowed) absolutism. But here, for the first time, was a

seemingly viable way of making revolution using neither state power nor

violent insurrection, and linking that process to a vision of a stateless

society, in a manner predicated on the consistency of means and ends.26

Gandhi showed, as Geoffrey Ostergaard explained in The Gentle

Anarchists, that “means and end are part of a continuous process, and are

morally indistinguishable. Put in another way, means are never merely

instrumental: they are always end-creating. What is regarded as the

objective is conceptually only a starting-point: the end can never be

predicted and must necessarily be left open. All that is certain is that from

immoral or even amoral ‘means,’ no moral ‘end’ can result.” What this

implied, contrary to traditional theories of revolution both Marxist and

anarchist, was that it was never acceptable to suspend one’s principles

during a “transitional” period (however short, however spontaneous)

when the revolution was being made. Rather,

every period is one of transition. With Truth and Non-violence as both the

means and the end, the Gandhian acts now according to these principles, as


far as he is able, and thereby achieves the goal he is striving for. For him, as

for Bernstein and Sorel, “The movement is everything; the final goal is

nothing.” The Sarvodaya “utopia,” one might say, is not something to be

realized in the distant future: it is something men begin to achieve here and

now. The important thing is not to “arrive” at utopia: it is to make a serious

attempt to travel in that direction. And this can be done only by men

behaving now in the way they want people in utopia to behave: truthfully,

lovingly, compassionately. Such a utopia, one might suggest, is not really a

goal at all: it is a convenient way of thinking about, ordering, systematizing,

and concretizing one’s values, a guide not to the future but to present

activity.27

This utopian quality to the notion of revolutionary nonviolence must

be stressed just as emphatically as whatever practical efficacy it may have

offered. To be sure, some of the effects nonviolent revolutionaries aimed

at were “direct,” geared toward making an immediate impact by impeding

the smooth functioning of an unjust and oppressive social order. But

through the power of exemplarity, these revolutionaries also aimed to

produce indirect effects geared toward longer-term, utopian possibilities.

They sought to live out principles in the present world that gestured

toward the kind of world they wished to bring into being. This kind of

exemplary action, writes the critical theorist Alessandro Ferrara,

overcomes the “dichotomic view of our world as split between facts and

values, facts and norms, Sein and Sollen, is and ought.” Exemplars are

“entities, material or symbolic, that are as they should be, atoms of

reconciliation where is and ought merge and, in so doing, liberate an

energy that sparks our imagination.”28 It is hardly surprising that the

exemplary politics of nonviolent revolution caught the attention of

anarchists like de Ligt, for there was plenty of precedent within the

anarchist tradition for this kind of “prefiguration.” The anarchist

movement’s spiral into violence had not only tarnished anarchism’s image

but had overshadowed other, peaceful tactics of change in which

anarchists had always taken an interest. Most anarchists realized that even

if violence played a decisive role in the revolutionary struggle, the

revolution could not be made by violence alone. Many supported efforts

to create alternative institutions, like cooperatives, communes, and


schools, that could help to transform individuals into revolutionaries and

prefigure the coming social order. With the rise of revolutionary

nonviolence, it became possible to imagine revolution as the cumulative

product of a variety of peaceful endeavors—some aimed at disruption,

others at transforming popular consciousness and preparing people for a

new kind of society.

Individual Resistance as Prefigurative Exemplarity

Because opportunities for collective resistance were so limited during the

World War II years, anarcho-pacifists were forced to think about how the

logic of prefigurative exemplarity could be enacted at the individual level.

There was special need during the historical moment generated by the

war, the prominent British anarcho-pacifist Alex Comfort felt, to

proclaim the importance of individuality, which was under threat like

never before as individuals were encouraged to identify their interests

with those of the state and adopt the reasoning of state elites as their own.

The “insanity” that prevailed among bellicose social elites at the top of the

political hierarchy, he warned, threatened to overtake society as a whole,

as the most inhuman actions met with the highest praise, and the

collective sense of shame was suspended at all levels, turning the

population at large into a willing participant in the barbarism of its

Machiavellian leaders.29 Comfort’s response to the problem of war, then,

began with a call for individual “responsibility”—not from those at the

top, for whom there was little hope— but from those whose everyday

sense of humanity had not been warped and undermined by power. As

the countries of Europe descended into their second major conflagration

of the century, responsibility was now only possible, Comfort wrote, in

“the single, isolated, unarmed partisan, relying on his wits.”30

As was true of the nineteenth-century anarchists who devolved

“revolution” into acts of individual resolve, there was a certain social

despair that informed Comfort’s perspective, a despair that reflected a

breakdown of faith in human collectives generally. As his fellow citizens

rallied behind the war effort, Comfort came to the conclusion that

“society” no less than the state had become the enemy of the individual:

“Society is rooted today in obedience, conformity, conscription, and the


stage has been reached at which, in order to live, you have to be an enemy

of society.”31 If the world had no sensible place for the individual,

Comfort wrote, the individual would have to become his own world; if

government offered no inlets for popular influence, people would have to

focus on governing themselves. At his most pessimistic, he argued that all

“corporate allegiances” had been discredited:

There are no corporate allegiances any longer, only individuals and groups

at continual variance with the corporate, and with all who are prepared to

delegate their minds, whether to a single ruler or to a committee of rulers.

That is to say, we are each of us, intellectually though not practically, a one

man nation. It looks as though the sole remaining factor standing between

the possibility of living a sane life and its destruction by lunatics is the

disobedience of the individual.32

Comfort’s call to responsibility was, then, something of a defensive action,

an effort to preserve a space of individual autonomy against wartime

jingoism as well as the even more pervasive attitude of deference to state

authority. But by no means was the individual disobedience Comfort

envisioned meant to culminate in quietism: “I am responsible,” he

averred on the BBC in 1948, “for seeing that I do nothing which harms

any other human being, and I leave nothing undone which can reduce the

amount of preventable suffering and failure.”33 Although the possibilities

for proactive struggle were limited during and immediately after the war,

Comfort’s understanding of individual responsibility clearly pointed

beyond mere conscientious objection to active resistance.

Comfort was not the only anarcho-pacifist to argue for principled

individual refusal as a means of affirming responsibility, contesting the

impunity of the state, and creating the preconditions of any potential

collective resistance. In his earliest political writings (collected in the so-

called “May Pamphlet” of 1945), the American anarchist Paul Goodman

wrote of the need for each individual to “draw a line” beyond which his

accession to and cooperation with the demands of state and society would

not extend. As in Comfort’s case, this recommendation presumed the

existence of hostile conditions, in which the innate, libertarian urge to live

naturally was heavily constrained by coercion and arbitrary authority.


Establishing a limit to one’s compliance was a means of empowering the

individual within a context not of his making: “We draw the line in their

conditions,” Goodman wrote, but “we proceed on our conditions.”34 The

exercise of individual autonomy, then, did not require one to withdraw

from public life, only to orient oneself properly within it. This explains

why Goodman thought it possible to “wage peace” even when conditions

seemed to foreclose any possibility of a libertarian course of action:

Obviously a man cannot act rightly with regard to bad alternatives by

simply not committing himself at all, for then he is in fact supporting

whichever bad alternative happens to be the stronger. But the free man can

often occupy an aggressive position outside either alternative, which

undercuts the situation and draws on neglected forces; so that even after the

issue has been decided between the alternatives, the issue is still

alive . . . This is the right action when the presented alternatives are frozen

fast in the coercive structure.35

Goodman’s perspective had a touch of existentialism to it, privileging

the decisiveness of the individual stand rather than its specific content and

accepting that “[n]o particular drawn line will ever be defensible

logically.”36 But Goodman saw in acts of individual refusal the protest not

so much of a unique will against absurdity and hopelessness as of nature

against artificiality, coercion, and constraint. The prefigurative aspect of

this conception of resistance was captured in Goodman’s exhortation “to

live in present society as though it were a natural society.”37 The individual

resistance Goodman imagined was not an egoistic act of self-expression

but an expansive gesture toward a society ordered in accordance with the

individual’s species-being. “Let us work not to express our ‘selves,’” he

cautioned, “but the nature in us . . . The freedom of the individual is the

expression of the natural animal and social groups to which he in fact

belongs.”38 What was most important about individual resistance was not

that it freed the individual but that it kept alive an anticipation of the kind

of society the individual hoped to create.

Acting in accordance with nature, Goodman argued, meant becoming

comfortable acting in ways that, though they flowed out of natural

instincts, were considered “criminal”; advocating for individual freedom


meant advocating “a large number of precisely those acts and words for

which persons are in fact thrown into jail.”39 Part of the challenge for

pacifists who felt compelled to behave illegally, Goodman realized, was to

get the public to associate lawbreaking not with vice but with virtue, not

with depravity but with the imperative expression of an irrepressible

human nature. Effecting this shift in public perspective was, of course,

integral to shaping the way in which the actions of militant pacifists would

be received. This image control was important, because the main payoff of

acts of individual assertion was not their contribution to the self-

satisfaction and integrity of the persons involved but rather their radiating

effects: “When the peace is waged, when there is individual excellence and

mutual aid, the result is exemplarity: models of achievement.”40 Echoing

his anarchist predecessors, Goodman held that “our acts of liberty are our

strongest propaganda.”41

Comfort’s and Goodman’s wartime writings encapsulated the

prevalent assumption within British and American anarcho-pacifism

that in one form or another, individual conscience had to be preserved

in the face of collective insanity, and principled refusal had to begin, if

nowhere else, at the individual level. Although it was not immediately

clear during the war years how individual resistance would grow into

collective resistance, there is little doubt that anarcho-pacifists like

Comfort and Goodman envisioned the former not as a mere

expression of individual authenticity but as a symbolic and exemplary

activity, indicative of deep responsibility to others as well as to the

integrity of the self. In its basic outline, their attitude represented a

rearticulation of the logic that had led some anarchists of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to adopt nefarious methods,

and like those desperados, Comfort and Goodman were in search of an

avenue of recourse for the isolated individual during dark and unpromising

times. But they had reason to hope that principled propaganda of the deed

directed against war and violence would succeed where its violent prototype

had failed, its effects multiplied like the “loaves and fishes” of scripture (to use

the evocative image proposed by the anarcho-pacifist and Catholic Worker

Dorothy Day), building into an ever-stronger current of nonviolent

struggle.42


Prefigurative Exemplarity in a Nuclear Age

The resistance that anarcho-pacifists were able to muster during and

immediately after the World War II years was, of course, limited in its

impact, although there were notable examples, especially in the American

case, of conscientious objectors banding together in ways that fostered

group solidarity and fed into postwar social activism.43 It was not until the

mid-1950s, when the radical Left—virtually dormant during the first

decade after the war— began to reemerge in the form of the anti-nuclear

movement, that conditions grew more favorable to the anarcho-pacifist

approach to social change, allowing individual resistance to grow into

group resistance and, finally, mass resistance. Of crucial importance was

that anarcho-pacifists within the anti-nuclear movement had a more

receptive audience than their counterparts during the war. Revelations

about the dangers of nuclear fallout caused by atmospheric testing gave

even the most apolitical Britons and Americans reason to believe that

their safety was being compromised by the new weapons. The testing issue

proved to be the opening through which the movement was able to bring

deeper concerns about the implications of nuclear weapons into public

consciousness and build support for not just an end to the tests but

outright nuclear disarmament.

Isolated pockets of group resistance to nuclear weapons appeared as

early as the late 1940s, but it was not until the mid-1950s that these began

to cohere into a movement. Closest in spirit to the quixotic resisters of the

war years were groups like the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear

War (DAC) in Britain (one of whose principal members was Alex

Comfort) and the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) in the

United States. The DAC and CNVA represented the most militant wing of

the anti-nuclear movement, and they were responsible for its first

experiments with civil disobedience. These groups have sometimes been

characterized in ways that would seem to clash with the idea of

prefigurative exemplarity. Some have seen them as vehicles for a

particular brand of uncompromising absolutist more interested in

demonstrating the purity of his motives than in the effects of his actions

or the publicity they generate.44 The evidence, however, suggests that

these groups were in fact grasping toward a way of reconciling adamant


individual commitment with the kind of dramatic and symbolic resistance

that could attract attention and inspire emulation.

One example was the famous Golden Rule action of 1957, in which four

radical pacifists—with the sponsorship of the group that was to become

the CNVA—attempted to sail a ship by that name into a restricted zone

near the Marshall Islands in protest of nuclear testing. Martin

Oppenheimer’s article on the incident in Dissent captured the curious

combination of steadfast deontology and outward projection it embodied.

The protesters, he wrote, had carried out their actions not so much

because they believed that they would be effective as “because they could

do no other.” Nevertheless, their actions were a kind of “propaganda of

the deed”—like the original exemplars of that tactic, they had thrown

their physical bodies “into a void where no other bridge seemed to exist,”

but unlike their precursors they had done so in a way that commanded

not only attention but admiration.45 Indeed, the action was one of the

movement’s shining successes, sparking a surge in organizing activity and

garnering extensive and sympathetic coverage in the press. This was

evidence that even acts interpreted by some as outgrowths of absolutist

abandon could, as Comfort and Goodman had hoped in the 1940s, have

radiant effects that were all the more powerful because they adhered to

strict (and nonviolent) principles.46

The actions carried out by the DAC, some of which also involved

efforts to infiltrate nuclear test zones, were of a similar character. In fact,

while the DAC aspired (as its name implied) to “direct” action, the

anarchist Nicolas Walter— one of the British anti-nuclear movement’s

most astute political thinkers, as well as one of its most committed

activists—argued that the group’s activities were better categorized as

“symbolic” action, a concept he equated with propaganda of the deed.47 It

was the DAC, in fact, that originated plans for a march between London

and Aldermaston (home of Britain’s Atomic Weapons Research

Establishment); initially envisioned as an exercise in direct action, the

demonstrative aspects of the march became paramount as it was taken

over by the more broad-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

(CND) and converted into the latter’s flagship annual event. The marches

mobilized tens of thousands of participants each year in some of the

largest protests in British history, proving that it was possible to build a


mass movement around what Walter described as the fundamentally

utopian goal of unilateral nuclear disarmament.48 Eventually, however,

the annual march became the focus of discontent for activists who felt

that the CND’s determination to keep protest within legal bounds was

compromising the impact the movement was having on the public mind.

Symbolic protest shorn of the militancy characteristic of the DAC and

CNVA, in other words, was quickly losing its effect as marches became

old-hat and media coverage dwindled. It was this realization that provided

the impetus for the formation of the Committee of 100, which became, in

David Goodway’s words, “the most important anarchist— or at least near-

anarchist—political organization of modern Britain.”49 The Committee of

100 sought to combine the most effective aspects of the DAC and the

CND: the militant activism of the DAC, which merged direct action and

civil disobedience, and the mass participation typical of CND events. This

mixture, it was hoped, would yield a spectacle more impressive than any

yet concocted by the movement: a nonviolent army of satyagrahis,

activists whose willingness to break through the strictures of law and

order and suffer the consequences of their provocative behavior would

give their resistance a transcendent character lacking in the tamer

symbolism of the CND.

Walter, one of the founding members of the Committee of 100,

elaborated the political theory informing the group’s actions and

objectives in his contributions to the journal Anarchy in 1962. Despite

aspiring to large-scale resistance, the “mass” that the Committee sought to

mobilize was not the mass of contemporary critiques of “mass society,”

which described an agglomeration of interchangeable individuals

rendered indistinguishable by conformity and highly susceptible to

manipulation by elites.50 Rather, the Committee envisioned its supporters

as a mosaic of autonomous persons, whose participation was a reflection

of their commitment to individual responsibility. Like Comfort and

Goodman, Walter traced the origins of collective resistance back to the

acts of personal resolve in which individuals chose resistance over

submission to the demands of state and society. Insofar as these acts were

visible to others, they transcended inner-directed “conscientious

objection” and became propaganda of the deed: even Thoreau, Walter

pointed out, had publicized his actions in the hopes that doing so would


have some effect on the improvement of society.51 The evolution of

pacifism since the days of Thoreau, however, had reflected the realization

that any serious effort to combat war and violence required “not so much

a negative programme of non-resistance or non-violent passive

resistance,” no matter how exhibitionist, as “a positive programme of

non-violent active resistance.”52 This meant fulfilling Comfort’s hope,

expressed 15 years earlier, that pacifism would “become politically

relevant” by “taking the offensive.”53

The desire to turn pacifism into a (nonviolent) fighting creed had been

present in groups like the DAC and CNVA from the earliest days of the

anti-nuclear movement. In Walter’s view, however, the “direct action” to

which these groups had aspired had always been more of a slogan than a

reality. To qualify as “direct” action, according to Walter’s criteria, it was

not enough for an action to be undertaken outside of official channels,

even if it involved civil disobedience. Rather, the term implied efficacy: it

described acts that were intended, as Walter explained in his About

Anarchism, “to win some measure of success rather than mere

publicity.”54 In the context of the anti-nuclear movement, this meant that

to qualify an action had to have a detectable and immediate impact on the

state’s ability to function. The early civil disobedience of the militant wing

of the movement, which featured small groups of activists attempting to

disrupt operations at nuclear test sites and military bases, had never really

risen above the level of the symbolic; as Walter pointed out, “[a]

demonstration doesn’t become direct action just because someone says it

does.”55 What was different about the Committee of 100 was its

commitment to mass civil disobedience. When large numbers of people

engaged in civil disobedience, Walter argued, it created the possibility of

meaningful interference with the agenda of the state.

The question facing the Committee was what form mass civil

disobedience should take to be most effective. Like Bart de Ligt, Walter

realized that the syndicalist tradition offered potentially useful models of

“resistance by mass non-violent direct action.”56 While previous attempts

to combine the syndicalist general strike with war resistance had been

targeted at particular wars and had depended upon dubious assumptions

about the pacifistic impulses of the working class, the unilateralist direct

action Walter proposed would constitute a “pre-emptive strike” against


war itself,57 sustained by the moralistic motivations of the “middle-class

radicals” who formed the backbone of the anti-nuclear movement.58

Operating outside of established political channels (in contrast to the CND’s

ill-fated efforts to convert the Labor Party to unilateralism), the mass direct

action Walter envisioned would represent a kind of “decentralized do-it-

yourself disarmament” corresponding to syndicalism’s “decentralized do-it-

yourself revolution,”59 or, as he suggested elsewhere, “an anarchist

insurrection without the violence.”60 Walter believed that this reworked

version of the general strike was not far from the Gandhian tactics that

had won so many within the movement over to the idea of nonviolent

resistance. While there were some obvious differences—Gandhi had

disapproved of sit-ins, for example, one of the anti-nuclear movement’s

favorite methods of civil disobedience—satyagraha had shown the

movement the possibility of waging a “dynamic war without violence.”

Unlike the sentimental pacifism of the nonresistance tradition, satyagraha

was “a moral and political equivalent of war, and at the same time a real

way of resisting war itself.”61 Walter urged Britons to demand that their

country “offer a sort of national satyagraha to the world.”62

By 1962 Walter was writing with enough hindsight not only to trace the

maturation of the anti-nuclear movement’s tactics but to evaluate them

with a critical eye informed by the disillusionment that had already led

him to quit the Committee of 100 once (only to rejoin it after it was

decentralized into 13 regional committees). When he wrote of the

potential for mass nonviolent civil disobedience to serve as a form of

direct action, he admitted that the idea was a kind of “myth, an expression

of a determination to act, not a description of a thing,” and he suggested that

his readers interpret it “metaphorically rather than literally.”63 The task of the

new pacifists—a “utopian” task, in Walter’s terms, but not therefore

unworthy of serious people—was “to make the myth real.”64 In the kind of

utopian campaign that the anti-nuclear movement represented—a

campaign that could never be certain of achieving its ends—the means by

which the struggle was conducted were paramount: “Unilateral

disarmament—that is our utopia. Mass non-violent action—that is our

myth. Every active ideology depends on a utopia and a myth, a vision of

the world to come and a way to get there . . . our telos or goal isn’t so

much the ultimate utopia as the immediate myth.”65


As in any fight against such slim odds, Walter realized, not only would

there inevitably be failures, but also the stated aims would likely remain

forever out of reach. It is in this connection that the exemplary, educative

effects of propaganda of the deed, its ability to accommodate the failure to

realize immediate objectives by generating ripple waves that resonated far

beyond them, once again took on relevance. So-called direct action was

not necessarily as bound to immediate efficacy as it purported to be: it

could be “important both in itself and as a gesture.”66 Historically, in fact,

“the high points of direct action”—rarely lasting successes in and of

themselves—took on “the same function as acts of propaganda by

deed.”67 Collective resistance on the model of the Committee of 100, aside

from whatever “direct” effects it may or may not have had, made for

forceful propaganda. In part, this was simply because of the size of the

spectacle it could create, which trumped anything within the capacity of

smaller groups, much less individuals. More importantly, however,

collective resistance afforded an opportunity to model communal ideals

like egalitarianism and participatory decision making. The decision-

making structure of the Committee was premised on direct democracy—

“democracy,” in Walter’s words, “defined in terms of face-to-face liberty,

equality and fraternity.”68 Thus it was meant to exhibit in nuce the kind of

society that its members hoped would supplant the Warfare State. Because

unilateralism was essentially a utopian demand relative to actually existing

political possibilities in Britain (not to mention in the United States), any

movement or organization seriously espousing it faced the task not only

of putting forward the demand but of modeling an alternative social

arrangement in which it could take on plausibility. What this meant, in

effect, was that bound up in the Committee’s call for the elimination of

nuclear weapons was a call for revolution. As a political program this was,

of course, even more utopian than unilateralism, and Walter realized that

it risked making the movement look like it was comprised of “damned

fools” rather than responsible individuals. But under the circumstances

created by the Bomb, he argued, Max Weber’s well-known dichotomy

between “responsibility” and “ultimate ends” proved false: putting

forward “almost unattainable” demands was in fact the responsible way to

confront a probable future that was “almost unimaginable.”69


Conclusion

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, anarcho-pacifism had attained a level of

acceptance on the resurgent Left that its original expositors could hardly

have imagined. Within the anti-nuclear movement in particular,

anarchists “wielded an influence out of all proportion to their size.”70 The

model of nonviolent struggle advocated by anarcho-pacifists seemed so

promising that to express sympathy for violent methods, even among

fellow anarchists, was to risk harsh condemnation. Vernon Richards,

editor of the British anarchist journal Freedom, discovered this directly

when, after a failed assassination attempt on South African Prime

Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1960, he wrote an editorial entitled “Too

Bad He Missed.” During the ensuing controversy, one respondent called

the piece “a crumbling monument to the bad old days.”71

To be sure, not everyone was sold on nonviolence. As the 1960s

progressed, many grew skeptical of the effectiveness of nonviolent protest

and direct action, which were becoming familiar to both the police and

the media, easily corralled and easily dismissed or ignored.72 Some groups,

like King Mob in Britain and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! in the

United States, experimented with forms of symbolic protest that gleefully

dispensed with propriety and focused more on cultural disruption than

on movement building. Others took their inspiration from the formerly

discredited strategy of violent insurrection, which was producing stunning

successes in the Third World. Che Guevara’s theory of guerrilla warfare

proved highly suggestive to the young, would-be revolutionaries spinning

off from the crumbling mass student organizations of the late 1960s, who

formed groups like the Angry Brigade and the Weather Underground.73

Although these groups aspired to be “urban guerrilla” organizations,

however, their bombings of targets like the homes of government

ministers, government buildings of various kinds, foreign embassies, and

emblems of bourgeois decadence (like the 1970 Miss World competition

in London) most resembled the actions of those orphaned revolutionaries

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had associated

propaganda of the deed with sporadic outbreaks of small-scale, symbolic

terror and assassination.74 Once again, what seemed to most observers to

be pitiful acts of futility were burdened with the task of inspiring a mass


uprising: as a famous publication by the Weather Underground wishfully

put it in 1974, “[a] single spark can start a prairie fire.”75

In retrospect, the spiral of social activism into violence at the end of the

1960s, which found radicals retreading paths originally carved out by

anarchist terrorists many decades earlier, was a vivid illustration of Marx’s

insight that even revolutionaries feel compelled to don the robes of those

who came before them. What distinguished anarcho-pacifism from this

kind of revolutionary playacting was not, certainly, that it was an

unmitigated success but rather that it helped to introduce a genuinely new

way of thinking about social change. The principled resistance both

theorized and put into practice by anarcho-pacifists in the middle decades

of the twentieth century was an annunciation of a new era of

revolutionary struggle, an era in which militancy was complemented by

responsibility, in which means and ends were reconciled, and in which

individual rebellion was not merely expressive but was integrated into

meaningful collective resistance. It was a model of resistance that strove to

combine, as Nicolas Walter recognized most clearly, the indirect effects of

what I have called prefigurative exemplarity with the direct effects made

possible by mass civil disobedience. Tactics like propaganda of the deed

and direct action once associated with insurrectionary anarchism and

anarcho-syndicalism, respectively, were infused by anarcho-pacifists with

the principle of nonviolence in a manner that made them freshly relevant.

Furthermore, in some of the most effective actions of the anti-nuclear

movement, these tactics were yoked together in a mutually reinforcing

way, linking immediate confrontation with the Warfare State to the

longer-term need to reveal vistas of democratic possibility and kindle new

veins of resistance through exemplary models of revolutionary behavior.

The novelty of the new tactics was not lost on the more perceptive

observers of postwar social activism. When Walter wrote that anti-nuclear

activists were like “radioactive atoms trying to build up a critical mass and

start off a chain reaction,” the obvious irony of his metaphor did not

negate the central implication: anarcho-pacifists felt that their tactical

innovations, not unlike the achievements of the scientists who split the

atom, had helped to liberate energies that had previously lain dormant

and unleashed powerful forces of change.76 These may not have been

powerful enough to rival the Bomb, but they undoubtedly had a


paradigm-shifting effect not only on anarchism but on the social

movements it influenced in the postwar era.

NOTES

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, as well as

Stephen Eric Bronner, Lincoln Addison, Benjamin Peters, and Elizabeth Bastian for their

comments on earlier versions of this article.

1. The quote comes from an article Orwell wrote for Partisan Review in 1941. See George

Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 2, My Country Right or Left,

1940 –1943 (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 52.

2. Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 39 – 40.

3. Marie Louise Berneri, Neither East nor West (London: Freedom Press, 1952), 56.

4. Berneri, Neither East Nor West, 56.

5. George Woodcock, Civil Disobedience (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,

1966), 4.

6. George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements

(Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1962), 392.

7. For a consideration of the ways in which anarchist ideas influenced the civil rights

movement, see Andrew Cornell, “‘White Skin, Black Masks’: Marxist and Anti-racist

Roots of Contemporary US Anarchism,” in Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and

Red, ed. Alex Pritchard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta, and Dave Berry (Basingstoke, UK:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 167– 86.

8. E. H. Carr, “The League of Peace and Freedom: An Episode in the Quest for Collective

Security,” Royal Institute of International Affairs 14 (1935): 837.

9. Carr, “The League of Peace and Freedom,” 838.

10. Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980),

303. It should be said that Marx believed it might be possible to effect revolution

peacefully in more democratic states like Britain, the United States, and possibly

Holland. But to treat peace as a principle rather than as an outcome of class struggle

was, he argued, to substitute vacuous moralizing for revolutionary realism.

11. For general accounts of propaganda of the deed, see Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the

Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1989), ch. 4; James Joll, The Anarchists (New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1964), ch. 5.


12. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 243.

The term was used in this sense in Brousse’s Arbeiter-Zeitung throughout 1876 and 1877.

13. Joll, The Anarchists, 122.

14. The group responsible for the dynamiting of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881 was

Narodnaya Volya, whose ideology cannot quite be characterized as anarchist. For an

account of how the group fits into the rather complicated landscape of

nineteenth-century Russian populism, see Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A

History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1960).

15. For examples, see Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New

York: Viking Press, 1931).

16. John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the

Age of Modern Terror (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).

17. Bart de Ligt, The Conquest of Violence: An Essay on War and Revolution (New York:

Dutton, 1938), 113.

18. As Geoffrey Ostergaard explained: “The syndicalist strategy represented a significant

move towards nonviolent revolution. Although the syndicalists were still far from being

pacifists—as they envisaged armed workers defending the revolution—the theory of the

revolutionary general strike was based on the same fundamental premise that underlies

nonviolent action: that the power of rulers depends, in the last analysis, not on physical

force but on the consent and cooperation, however reluctant, of the ruled. In essence,

the syndicalist general strike represented the total noncooperation of workers in the

continuance of rule by the capitalists.” Non-violent Revolution in India (New Delhi:

Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985), xiv.

19. De Ligt, The Conquest of Violence, 23.




23. See Richard Gregg, The Power of Nonviolence (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), and

Krishnalal Shridharani, War without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and Its

Accomplishments (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939).

24. Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (New York: Rudolph Field, 1948).

25. Geoffrey Ostergaard, The Gentle Anarchists: A Study of the Leaders of the Sarvodaya

Movement for Non-violent Revolution in India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 28.

26. In her influential explication of Gandhi’s thought, Joan Bondurant argues that

nonviolent resistance offers the solution to anarchism’s persistent means-ends


problem: see Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1988), 171– 86.

27. Ostergaard, The Gentle Anarchists, 41.

28. Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), ix–x.

29. Alex Comfort, Writings against Power and Death, ed. David Goodway (London:

Freedom Press, 1994), 38.

30. Comfort, Writings against Power and Death, 40.




34. Paul Goodman, Drawing the Line: The Political Essays of Paul Goodman, ed. Taylor

Stoehr (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977), 10.

35. Goodman, Drawing the Line, 39.







42. For a more skeptical take on militant pacifism as propaganda of the deed, see David

Thoreau Wieck, “From Politics to Social Revolution” Resistance 12 (1954).

43. For examples, see James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical Pacifism from the Union Eight to

the Chicago Seven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Lawrence S.

Wittner, Rebels against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983 (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1984).

44. See Christopher Driver, The Disarmers: A Study in Protest (London: Hodder and

Stoughton, 1964), 50 –51.

45. Oppenheimer is quoted in Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer . . . The Death of the

Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 128.

46. The Catholic Worker also undertook actions during this era that fit this pattern. In

1955, Catholic Workers took the lead in organizing a defiant demonstration against civil

defense drills in New York City, during which they illegally gathered outside City Hall

when city authorities commanded residents to hunker down for a mock nuclear attack.

The demonstration attracted national media attention, pulled in leading luminaries of

the peace movement like A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, and Bayard Rustin, and became


an annual event, growing to 2,000 protesters by 1962 and rendering the ordinance that

pertained to such drills unenforceable.

47. Walter took the idea of “symbolic action” from April Carter, a member of the DAC

who had endeavored to articulate the political theory informing the group’s actions. See

her Direct Action and Liberal Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

48. See in particular his “Damned Fools in Utopia,” in Damned Fools in Utopia, and Other

Writings on Anarchism and War Resistance, ed. David Goodway (Oakland, CA: PM

Press, 2011).

49. David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 261.

50. Walter approvingly quoted Colin Ward’s remark that the work of the anti-nuclear

movement was “part of a larger task: that of turning the mass society into a mass of

societies.” Damned Fools in Utopia, 75.

51. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 43.



54. Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 2002), 87– 88.




58. See Frank Parkin’s classic study Middle-Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968)

for a discussion of the wellsprings of middle-class, as contrasted with working-class,

radicalism.









67. Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism, 88.




70. Richard Taylor and Colin Pritchard, The Protest Makers: The British Nuclear

Disarmament Movement of 1958 –1965, Twenty Years On (Oxford: Pergamon Press,

1980), 36.

71. Vernon Richards, ed., Violence and Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1983), 11.

72. Nicolas Walter, desperate to inject greater militancy into the movement, resorted to

clandestine and conspiratorial actions out of keeping with some of the generally

accepted guidelines of nonviolent resistance. As a member of the “Spies for Peace,” he

broke into the Regional Seat of Government at Warren Row in 1963 and helped to steal

documents detailing secret government plans for ruling the country in the event of a

nuclear war. The episode was one of the most sensational of its time and received

front-page press coverage until the British government pressured the media to drop the

story. See his essay “The Spies for Peace and After” in Damned Fools in Utopia, and his

daughter Natasha Walter’s “How My Father Spied for Peace,” New Statesman, 20 May

2002.

73. Also noteworthy was the influence of Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?

Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (New York: Grove Press, 1967).

For general histories of these groups, see Gordon Carr, The Angry Brigade: A History of

Britain’s First Urban Guerilla Group (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), and Jeremy Varon,

Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and

Revolutionary Violence in the 60s and 70s (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2004).

74. We should not overlook some important differences, however: these groups were

discriminating in their choices of targets, their actions were attributed to groups rather

than individuals, and their attacks were directed primarily at property rather than

people.

75. See the group’s self-published, book-length manifesto Prairie Fire.



Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century

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