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.
64 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 65
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
66 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 67
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
68 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 69
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
70 Benjamin J. Pauli
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,
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 71
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
72 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 73
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
74 Benjamin J. Pauli
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.
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 75
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
76 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 77
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
78 Benjamin J. Pauli
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.
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 79
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
80 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 81
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
82 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 83
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
84 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 85
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
86 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 87
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
88 Benjamin J. Pauli
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 89
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.
90 Benjamin J. Pauli
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.
20. De Ligt, The Conquest of Violence, 135.
21. De Ligt, The Conquest of Violence, 72.
22. De Ligt, The Conquest of Violence, 135.
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
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 91
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.
31. Comfort, Writings against Power and Death, 39.
32. Comfort, Writings against Power and Death, 35.
33. Comfort, Writings against Power and Death, 113.
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.
36. Goodman, Drawing the Line, 9.
37. Goodman, Drawing the Line, 3.
38. Goodman, Drawing the Line, 20.
39. Goodman, Drawing the Line, 18.
40. Goodman, Drawing the Line, 44.
41. Goodman, Drawing the Line, 19.
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
92 Benjamin J. Pauli
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.
52. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 63.
53. Comfort, Writings against Power and Death, 85.
54. Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 2002), 87– 88.
55. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 74.
56. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 61.
57. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 74.
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.
59. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 74.
60. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 56.
61. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 65.
62. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 69.
63. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 74.
64. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 70.
65. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 69.
66. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 63.
67. Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism, 88.
68. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 33.
69. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 23.
Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 93
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.
76. Walter, Damned Fools in Utopia, 78.
94 Benjamin J. Pauli
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