Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-pacifism Anarcho-pacifism (also pacifist anarchism or anarchist pacifism) is a tendency within the anarchist movement which rejects the use of violence in the struggle for social change. The main early influences were the thought of Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy while later the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi gained importance. It developed mostly in Holland, Britain, and the United States, before and during the Second World WarHenry David Thoreau was an important early influence in individualist anarchist thought in the United States and Europe. Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist. Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government) is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. It argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War. It would influence Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Buber and Leo Tolstoy through its advocacy of nonviolent resistance. It is also the main prescedent for anarcho-pacifism. Anarchism started to have an ecological view mainly in the writings of American individualist anarchist and transcendentalist Thoreau. In his book Walden, he advocates simple living and self-sufficiency among natural surroundings in resistance to the advancement of industrial civilization. Many have seen in Thoreau one of the precursors of ecologism and anarcho-primitivism represented today in John Zerzan. For George Woodcock this attitude can be also motivated by certain idea of resistance to progress and of rejection of the growing materialism which is the nature of American society in the mid-19th century. John Zerzan himself included the text Excursions (1863) by Thoreau in his edited compilation of anti-civilization writings called Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections from 1999. Walden made Thoreau influential in the European individualist anarchist green current of anarcho-naturism. In the 1840s, the American abolitionist and advocate of nonresistance Henry Clarke Wright, and his English follower Joseph Barker, rejected the idea of governments and advocated a form of pacifist individualist anarchism. At some point anarcho-pacifism had as its main proponent Christian anarchism. The first large-scale anarcho-pacifist movement was the Tolstoyan peasant movement in Russia. They were a predominantly peasant movement that set up hundreds of voluntary anarchist pacifist communes based on their interpretation of Christianity as requiring absolute pacifism and the rejection of all coercive authority. They were active throughout Russia and followed a strict Vegetarian diet. Because of their refusal to recognize the authority of the Tsarist state they were targeted for severe repression and many were killed outright[citation needed] or relocated to Siberia. After the Bolshevik Revolution they were again targeted for repression because they refused to recognize the authority of the new socialist state, just as they had refused to recognize the authority of its predecessor. Most of them were killed in the purges under Lenin and Stalin. Violence has always been controversial in anarchism. While many anarchists during the 19th century embraced violent propaganda of the deed, Leo Tolstoy and other anarcho-pacifists directly opposed violence as a means for change. He argued that anarchism must be nonviolent since it is, by definition, opposition to coercion and force, and that since the state is inherently violent, meaningful pacifism must likewise be anarchistic. His philosophy was cited as a major inspiration by Mohandas Gandhi, an Indian independence leader and pacifist who self-identified as an anarchist. Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis was also instrumental in establishing the pacifist trend within the anarchist movement. In France anti-militarism appeared strongly in individualist anarchist circles as Émile Armand founded Ligue Antimilitariste in 1902.Dutch anarchist-pacifist Bart de Ligt’s 1936 treatise The Conquest of Violence (with its none-too-subtle allusion to Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread) was also of signal importance. Gandhis ideas were popularised in the West in books such as Richard Greggs The Power of Nonviolence (1935), and Bart de Ligts The Conquest of Violence (1937). The latter is particularly important for anarchists since, as one himself, de Ligt specifically addressed those who lust for revolution. The more violence, the less revolution, he declared. He also linked Gandhian principled nonviolence with the pragmatic nonviolent direct action of the syndicalists. (The General Strike is an expression of total noncooperation by workers, though it should be added that most syndicalists believed that the revolution should be defended by armed workers.) As a global movement, anarchist pacifism emerged shortly before World War II in the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States and was a strong presence in the subsequent campaigns for nuclear disarmament. The American writer Dwight Macdonald endorsed anarcho-pacifist views in the 1940s and used his journal Politics to promote these ideas. For Andrew Cornell Many young anarchists of this period departed from previous generations both by embracing pacifism and by devoting more energy to promoting avant-garde culture, preparing the ground for the Beat Generation in the process. The editors of the anarchist journal Retort, for instance, produced a volume of writings by WWII draft resistors imprisoned at Danbury, Connecticut, while regularly publishing the poetry and prose of writers such as Kenneth Rexroth and Norman Mailer. From the 1940s to the 1960s, then, the radical pacifist movement in the United States harbored both social democrats and anarchists, at a time when the anarchist movement itself seemed on its last legs. A leading British anarcho-pacifist was Alex Comfort who considered himself an aggressive anti-militarist, and he believed that pacifism rested solely upon the historical theory of anarchism. He was an active member of CND. Among the works on anarchism by Comfort is Peace and Disobedience (1946), one of many pamphlets he wrote for Peace News and the Peace Pledge Union, and Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State (1950). He exchanged public correspondence with George Orwell defending pacifism in the open letter/poem Letter to an American Visitor under the pseudonym Obadiah Hornbrooke. In the 1950s and 1960s anarcho-pacifism began to gel, tough-minded anarchists adding to the mixture their critique of the state, and tender-minded pacifists their critique of violence. Within the context of the emergence of the New Left and the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) several themes, theories, actions, all distinctly libertarian, began to come to the fore and were given intellectual expression by the American anarcho-pacifist, Paul Goodman.Other notable anarcho-pacifist historical figures include Ammon Hennacy, Dorothy Day and, for a brief period between 1939 and 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre. Dorothy Day, (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist and devout Catholic convert; she advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism. She was also considered to be an anarchist, and did not hesitate to use the term. In the 1930s, Day worked closely with fellow activist Peter Maurin to establish the Catholic Worker movement, a nonviolent, pacifist movement that continues to combine direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. The cause for Days canonization is open in the Catholic Church. Ammon Hennacy (July 24, 1893 – January 14, 1970) was an American pacifist, Christian anarchist, vegetarian, social activist, member of the Catholic Worker Movement and a Wobbly. He established the Joe Hill House of Hospitality in Salt Lake City, Utah and practiced tax resistance. Charles-Auguste Bontemps was a prolific author mainly in the anarchist, freethinking, pacifist and naturist press of the time. His view on anarchism was based around his concept of Social Individualism on which he wrote extensively. He defended an anarchist perspective which consisted on a collectivism of things and an individualism of persons. Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers was a French writer, art critic, pacifist and anarchist. Lacaze-Duthiers, an art critic for the Symbolist review journal La Plume, was influenced by Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche and Max Stirner. His (1906) LIdeal Humain de lArt helped found the Artistocracy movement - a movement advocating life in the service of art. His ideal was an anti-elitist aestheticism: All men should be artists. Jean-René Saulière (also René Saulière) (Bordeaux, September 6, 1911- January 2, 1999) was a French anarcho-pacifist, individualist anarchist and freethought writer and militant who went under the pseudonym André Arru. During the late 1950s he establishes inside the Fédération des Libres Penseurs des Bouches du Rhône, the Group Francisco Ferrer and in 1959 he joins the Union des Pacifistes de France (Union of Pacifists of France). From 1968 to 1982, Arru alongside the members of the Group Francisco Ferrer publishes La Libre Pensée des Bouches du Rhône. In the 1970s in the United States the efforts of the Movement for a New Society, a national network of feminist radical pacifist collectives that existed from 1971 to 1988. David Graeber reports that in the late 1970s in the northeast The main inspiration for anti-nuclear activists—at least the main organizational inspiration—came from a group called the Movement for a New Society (MNS), based in Philadelphia. MSN was spearheaded by a gay rights activist named George Lakey, who—like several other members of the group—was both an anarchist, and a Quaker...Many of what have now become standard features of formal consensus process—the principle that the facilitator should never act as an interested party in the debate, for example, or the idea of the “block”—were first disseminated by MNS trainings in Philadelphia and Boston. For Andrew Cornell MNS popularized consensus decision-making, introduced the spokescouncil method of organization to activists in the United States, and was a leading advocate of a variety of practices—communal living, unlearning oppressive behavior, creating co-operatively owned businesses—that are now often subsumed under the rubric of “prefigurative politics.For An Anarchist FAQ the attraction of pacifism to anarchists is clear. Violence is authoritarian and coercive, and so its use does contradict anarchist principles...(Errico) Malatesta is even more explicit when he wrote that the main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. Anarcho-pacifism tend to see the state as organised violence and so they see that it would therefore seem logical that anarchists should reject all violence Anarcho-pacifism criticizes the separation between means and ends. Means,...must not merely be consistent with ends; this principle, though preferable to the end justifies the means, is based on a misleading dichotomy. Means are ends, never merely instrumental but also always expressive of values; means are end-creating or ends-in-the making. An anarcho-pacifist critique of capitalism was provided by Bart de Ligt in his The conquest of Violence. An Anarchist FAQ reports how all anarchists would agree with de Ligt on, to use the name of one of his books chapters, the absurdity of bourgeois pacifism. For de Ligt, and all anarchists, violence is inherent in the capitalist system and any attempt to make capitalism pacifistic is doomed to failure. This is because, on the one hand, war is often just economic competition carried out by other means. Nations often go to war when they face an economic crisis, what they cannot gain in economic struggle they attempt to get by conflict. On the other hand, violence is indispensable in modern society. . . [because] without it the ruling class would be completely unable to maintain its privileged position with regard to the exploited masses in each country. The army is used first and foremost to hold down the workers. . . when they become discontented. [Bart de Ligt, Op. Cit., p. 62] As long as the state and capitalism exist, violence is inevitable and so, for anarcho-pacifists, the consistent pacifist must be an anarchist just as the consistent anarchist must be a pacifist.A main component of anarcho-pacifist strategy is civil disobedience as advocated by the early anarchist thinker Henry David Thoreau in the essay of the same name from 1849. Leo Tolstoy was influenced by it and he saw that a great weapon for undermining (rather than overthrowing) the state was the refusal by individuals to cooperate with it and obey its immoral demands. Also the concepts of passive and active resistance have relevance as they were developed later by Mohandas Gandhi. For anarchist historian George Woodcock the modern pacifist anarchists,...have tended to concentrate their attention largely on the creation of libertarian communities -- particularly farming communities -- within present society, as a kind of peaceful version of the propaganda by deed. They divide, however, over the question of action.. Anarcho-pacifists can even accept the principle of resistance and even revolutionary action (Nonviolent revolution), provided it does not incur violence, which they see as a form of power and therefore nonanarchist in nature. This change in attitude has led the pacifist anarchists to veer toward the anarchosyndicalists, since the latters concept of the general strike as the great revolutionary weapon made an appeal to those pacifists who accepted the need for fundamental social change but did not wish to compromise their ideal by the use of negative (i.e., violent) means.While anarcho-pacifism is most commonly associated with religious anarchism such as Tolstoyan Christian anarchism and Buddhist anarchism, irreligious or even anti-religious tendencies have emerged such as the French individualist anarchist anarcho-pacifist tendency exemplified by authors and activists such as Charles-Auguste Bontemps, André Arru and Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers which aligned itself with atheism and freethought. The anarcho-punk band Crass polemicised a variant of anarcho-pacifism whilst at the same time explicitly rejecting all religions, especially the symbols of establishment Christian theology. Opposition to the use of violence has not prohibited anarcho-pacifists from accepting the principle of resistance or even revolutionary action provided it does not result in violence; in fact it was their approval of such forms of opposition to power that lead anarcho-pacifists to endorse the anarcho-syndicalist concept of the general strike as the great revolutionary weapon. Later anarcho-pacifists have also come to endorse to non-violent strategy of dual power, as championed by Mutualism. Peter Gelderloos is a popular critic of the idea that nonviolence is the only way to fight for a better world. Pacifism as an ideology is said to serve the interests of the state and is hopelessly caught up psychologically with the control schema of patriarchy and white supremacy.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 14:48:54 +0000
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