Direct Action and Democratic Politics by Robert Benewick & Trevor Smith

Author:Robert Benewick & Trevor Smith [Benewick, Robert & Smith, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780043500415
Google: PJxhQgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 384791
Publisher: Allen and Unwin
Published: 1972-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Nature of Civil Disobedience, 1958–1963

The pioneers in the DAC were pacifists, who, under the influence of the Gandhi tradition, had developed a campaign-tactic distinct from those of the Quakers and the Peace Pledge Union. Their symbolic direct action had the power to command attention. Arrests were news. Individuals who put themselves at risk impelled others to take notice. The transition from the DAC to the Committee of 100 in 1960–1 constituted a shift from symbolism to what either was, or was intended to be, mass action on a scale that would worry the government. The need for this was held to arise from the situation itself. At that time, Bertrand Russell thought that nuclear war was likely within twelve months unless drastic action was taken to stop it. His point was taken. Events were later to prove him wrong, but in 1961 there was every justification for profound anxiety as one crisis followed another with alarming rapidity: the Bay of Pigs invasion, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Russians’ biggest-ever nuclear weapon-tests in the atmosphere, a major financial crisis, the Congo debacle, and the deaths of Lumumba and Hammarskjold.

Socialists and anarchists poured into the ranks of direct action to join the pacifists. A great and eventually unresolved debate began between those who saw non-violent direct action as a principle and those who saw it as a tactic. To Russell, it was a tactic, a device to secure necessary instant publicity and support in a dire emergency. Nevertheless, the general policy of the DAC prevailed on demonstrations. The briefing for demonstration after demonstration had a similar character.

1) Try to get to the objective.

2) If you are stopped by the police, sit down.

3) When told by the police to move, refuse to do so. (The individual has to make up his own mind over this, bearing in mind the possible penalties and his own personal circumstances.)

4) When being removed by the police, offer no resistance, go limp and insist on being carried away.

The atmosphere was quiet and controlled. There was no shouting, no running, very little hostility to the police and a general conviction that the self-evident rightness of the case for unilateral nuclear disarmament would rally such support that the day would be won. The first nine months of 1961 seemed to provide good grounds for so thinking. But then the crises passed, and it became apparent that nuclear war was not imminent. In December 1961, a series of demonstrations inspired by the DAC school in the Committee were poor in conception and worse in execution. Nearly all the VIP support fell away.

The great rethink began. It moved in two new directions simultaneously, away from both pacifist symbolism and emergency mass mobilization.

The school of the first direction asked: If non-violence is our means, and means are ends in embryo, what is the nature of our ends? What do we mean by the non-violent society, and what can we start to do now that will take us towards it? The

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