Anarcho-pacifism

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Anarcho-pacifism, also referred to as anarchist pacifism and pacifist anarchism, is an

Christian anarchists, who reject war and the use of violence.[4]

Anarcho-pacifists do not reject the use of non-violent revolutionary action against capitalism and the state with the purpose of establishing a peaceful voluntarist society.[1][5] The main early influences were the philosophies of Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy while later the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi gained significance.[1][2] Anarcho-pacifist movements primarily emerged in the Netherlands, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States before and during World War II.[2]

History

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an important early influence in individualist anarchist thought in the United States and Europe. Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" (Resistance to Civil Government) was named as an influence by Leo Tolstoy, Martin Buber, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. due to its advocacy of nonviolent resistance.[1] According to the Peace Pledge Union of Britain, it was also the main precedent for anarcho-pacifism.[1] Thoreau himself did not subscribe to pacifism, and did not reject the use of armed revolt. He demonstrated this with his unqualified support for John Brown and other violent abolitionists,[6] writing of Brown that "The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it."[7]

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.[8] At some point anarcho-pacifism had as its main proponent Christian anarchism. The Tolstoyan movement in Russia was the first large-scale anarcho-pacifist movement.

Circle-A

Violence has always been controversial in anarchism. While many anarchists embraced violent

individualist anarchist circles, as Émile Armand co-founded "Ligue Antimilitariste" in December 1902 with fellow anarchists Georges Yvetot, Henri Beylie, Paraf-Javal, Albert Libertad and Émile Janvion. The Ligue antimilitariste was to become the French section of the Association internationale antimilitariste (AIA) founded in Amsterdam in 1904.[9]

Tolstoy's philosophy was cited as a major inspiration by

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.)"[1] The Conquest of Violence alludes to Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread.[10]

Bart de Ligt, influential Dutch anarcho-pacifist writer of the theoretical work The Conquest of Violence

As a global movement, anarchist pacifism emerged shortly before

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."[10][12] 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."[13][14] He was an active member of CND.[15]

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).[13] He exchanged public correspondence with George Orwell defending pacifism in the open letter/poem "Letter to an American Visitor" under the pseudonym "Obadiah Hornbrooke."[16]

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".

Paul Goodman."[1]

anarcho-pacifist

Other notable anarcho-pacifist historical figures include

André Arru.[27][28][29] During the late 1950s he establishes inside the Fédération des Libres Penseurs des Bouches du Rhône, the Group Francisco Ferrer[30] and in 1959 he joins the Union des Pacifistes de France (Union of Pacifists of France).[30]
From 1968 to 1982, Arru alongside the members of the Group Francisco Ferrer publishes La Libre Pensée des Bouches du Rhône.

An anarchist protest, showing anarchist and pacifist symbolism

"

electoral politics, including the re-election of Barack Obama as U.S. president.[32]

Thought

According to the authors of 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".[33]

Washington DC

Anarcho-pacifists tend to see the state as 'organised violence' and so they see that "it would therefore seem logical that anarchists should reject all violence".[1] 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".[1]

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 book's 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".[33]

Mohandas Gandhi.[1]

For anarchist historian

anarcho-syndicalists, since the latter's 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."[2]

Ideological variance

peace

Anarcho-pacifism is frequently associated with various forms of religious anarchism such as

Aylmer Maude (the friend, biographer and translator of Leo Tolstoy) states that Christianity involves anarchism as it necessitates the "abolition of all compulsory legislation, law courts, police, and prisons, as well as all forcible restraint of man by man".[4][36] Due to Tolstoy's religious views combined with his advocacy for the total dismantlement of the state and its apparatus in favour of the establishment of a voluntarist society, he is seen as a prominent instigator of Christian anarchism.[5][4]

Anarcho-pacifism is often combined with

Anarchist schools of thought can be generally distinguished from one another by their perspectives on two key elements, namely revolutionary methods and economic organisation.[2] Anarcho-pacifism differs from social anarchism in rejecting the use of violent revolutionary methods to achieve social change and the abolition of the state.[5]

Irreligious or even

anarcho-syndicalist concept of the general strike as the great revolutionary weapon.[2]

Criticism

Peter Gelderloos criticizes the idea that nonviolence is the only way to fight for a better world. According to Gelderloos, pacifism as an ideology serves the interests of the state and is hopelessly caught up psychologically with the control schema of patriarchy and white supremacy.[39] The influential publishing collective CrimethInc. notes that "violence" and "nonviolence" are politicized terms that are used inconsistently in discourse, depending on whether or not a writer seeks to legitimize the actor in question. They argue that "[i]t's not strategic [for anarchists] to focus on delegitimizing each other's efforts rather than coordinating to act together where we overlap". For this reason, both CrimethInc. and Gelderloos advocate for diversity of tactics.[40]

Albert Meltzer criticised extreme pacifism as authoritarian, believing that "The cult of extreme nonviolence always implies an elite." However, he did believe that less extreme pacifism was compatible with anarchism.[41]

See also

References

  1. ^ .
  2. ^ .
  3. .
  4. ^ .
  5. ^ .
  6. ^ "James Mark Shields, "Thoreau's Lengthening Shadow: Pacifism and the Legacy of 'Civil Disobedience'" Bucknell University website" (PDF).
  7. JSTOR 30228175
    .
  8. (p. 395-6).
  9. .
  10. ^ a b c d Cornell, Andrew (2009). "Anarchism and the Movement for a New Society: Direct Action and Prefigurative Community in the 1970s and 80s". Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. Archived from the original on 18 May 2013.
  11. , (p. 210).
  12. ^ a b David Graeber. "THE REBIRTH OF ANARCHISM IN NORTH AMERICA, 1957–2007". HAOL, No. 21 (Invierno, 2010), 123–131
  13. ^ a b Rayner, Claire (28 March 2000). "News: Obituaries: Alex Comfort". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 23 August 2008.
  14. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (1992) by Peter Marshall, and Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (2006) by David Goodway
    .
  15. .
  16. ^ Complete Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell volume II, pg. 294–303
  17. ^ Taylor, John, "Abandoning Pacifism: The Case of Sartre", Journal of European Studies, Vol. 89, 1993
  18. ^ Day, Dorothy. On Pilgrimage – May 1974 Archived 7 October 2012 at the Wayback Machine, "There was no time to answer the one great disagreement which was in their minds—how can you reconcile your Faith in the monolithic, authoritarian Church which seems so far from Jesus who "had no place to lay his head," and who said "sell what you have and give to the poor,"--with your anarchism? Because I have been behind bars in police stations, houses of detention, jails and prison farms, whatsoever they are called, eleven times, and have refused to pay Federal income taxes and have never voted, they accept me as an anarchist. And I in turn, can see Christ in them even though they deny Him, because they are giving themselves to working for a better social order for the wretched of the earth."
  19. Proudhon
    ), as was Dorothy Day a staunch Christian pacifist and anarchist who founded it in 1933."
  20. ^ Reid, Stuart (8 September 2008) Day by the Pool Archived 26 October 2010 at the Wayback Machine, The American Conservative
  21. ^ Day, Dorothy.On Pilgrimage – February 1974 Archived 6 October 2012 at the Wayback Machine, "The blurb on the back of the book Small Is Beautiful lists fellow spokesmen for the ideas expressed, including "Alex Comfort, Paul Goodman and Murray Bookchin. It is the tradition we might call anarchism." We ourselves have never hesitated to use the word."
  22. ^ a b "Ephéméride Anarchiste 9 février". www.ephemanar.net.
  23. ^ "BONTEMPS Auguste, Charles, Marcel dit " Charles-Auguste " ; " CHAB " ; " MINXIT " - [Dictionnaire international des militants anarchistes]". militants-anarchistes.info.
  24. ^ Peterson, Joseph (1 August 2010). Gérard De Lacaze-Duthiers, Charles Péguy, and Edward Carpenter: An Examination of Neo-Romantic Radicalism Before the Great War (M.A. thesis). Clemson University. pp. 8, 15–30.
  25. ^ Lacaze-Duthiers, L'Ideal Humain de l'Art, pp.57–8.
  26. ^ Guerin, Cedric. "Pensée et action des anarchistes en France: 1950–1970" (PDF). Public Federation. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 September 2007. Retrieved 31 August 2013.
  27. ^ "ARRU, André [SAULIÈRE Jean, René, Gaston dit] - [Dictionnaire international des militants anarchistes]". militants-anarchistes.info.
  28. ^ ""André Arru (aka Jean-René Sauliere)" at "The Anarchist Encyclopedia: A Gallery of Saints & Sinners"". Recollectionbooks.com. Archived from the original on 14 June 2012. Retrieved 29 September 2012.
  29. ^ "Courte biographie (1ère partie)". Raforum.info. 27 August 1948. Archived from the original on 1 January 2014. Retrieved 29 September 2012.
  30. ^ a b "Courte biographie (2ème partie)". Archived from the original on 1 January 2014. Retrieved 8 July 2013.
  31. ISSN 1937-0229
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  32. ^ "Zcomm » George Lakey interview". zcomm.org. 7 August 2012.
  33. ^ a b "2A.3 What types of anarchism are there?". Archived from the original on 6 July 2013. Retrieved 1 July 2013.
  34. .
  35. ^ Weber, Max (1921). Politics as a Vocation. Munich.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  36. .
  37. ^ Llewellyn, Joseph (2018). Envisioning an Anarcho-Pacifist Peace: A case for the convergence of anarchism and pacifism and an exploration of the Gandhian movement for a stateless society (PDF). Dunedin: University of Otago. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  38. ^ Aitch, Iain (19 October 2007). "Why should we accept any less than a better way of doing things?". The Guardian. Unlimited Arts. London. Archived from the original on 24 July 2008. Retrieved 26 December 2007.
  39. .
  40. ^ Collective, CrimethInc Ex-Workers (27 March 2012). "CrimethInc.: The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy". CrimethInc.
  41. .

Bibliography

External links