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

BENJAMIN J. PAULI Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century How much better is “propaganda by deed” when it is against bombs instead of with them? —Nicolas Walter T he years during and after World War II saw a remarkable evolution in anarchist views on violence. While earlier generations of anarchists had assumed that violence would, in one way or another, factor into the revolutionary struggle, those who identified as anarchists in the first two decades after the war in Britain and the United States were far more likely to adopt nonviolence as an almost default position. Anarchists were among those who pioneered the use of nonviolent resistance in the British and American contexts, and anarchist ideas exerted a strong influence within the postwar anti-nuclear movement, which in its most radical manifestations situated its opposition to nuclear weapons within a broader opposition to war, militarism, and violence of all kinds. Although few postwar anarchists 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 62 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 63 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 64 Benjamin J. Pauli 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. Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 65 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 66 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 67 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 68 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 69 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 70 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 71 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, 72 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 73 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 74 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 75 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. 76 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 77 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 78 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 79 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. 80 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 81 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 82 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 83 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 84 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 85 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 86 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 87 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 88 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 89 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 90 Benjamin J. Pauli 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. Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 91 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 92 Benjamin J. Pauli 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 Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century 93 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. 94 Benjamin J. Pauli 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.