Libertarian Socialism by Prichard Alex; Kinna Ruth; Pinta Saku

Author:Prichard, Alex; Kinna, Ruth; Pinta, Saku
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Anarchists and socialists become non-violent revolutionaries

Most of the militant war resisters were released in the months surrounding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the USA. Horrified by the scale of callous violence unleashed by the bomb, they expected a mass movement to arise in opposition to its use. In the August 1945 issue of Politics, which maintained close ties to Why? and Retort, editor Dwight MacDonald argued that the USA’s willingness to use atomic weapons meant, simply, ‘We must “get” the modern national state, before it “gets” us.’12 MacDonald began his political career in the Trotskyist movement and was later considered a major figure among the ‘New York Intellectuals’. The war and the bomb, however, had pushed him into the anarchist-pacifist camp.13 Many former-COs concurred with MacDonald’s anti-statism, as well as his assertion that to prevent another war, the entire society, structured in violence as it was, had to be transformed.

One key to such a transformation, they agreed, was continuing the fight against segregation and other manifestations of white supremacy. As early as 1942, the socialist radical pacifists Bayard Rustin, George Houser and James Farmer had launched the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to put Gandhian techniques into play to combat the segregation of restaurants, swimming pools and other public facilities. In 1947, CORE organised a Journey of Reconciliation, in which an interracial team of volunteers – including Rustin, the anarchist Igal Roodenko and Wieck’s cellmate Jim Peck – travelled by bus through southern states to test compliance with a 1946 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in interstate transportation facilities. Some of the riders faced beatings and were sentenced to work on the chaingang for their breach of racial protocol, but their treatment was much less severe than that encountered by participants in CORE’s iconic 1961 Freedom Rides, modelled on the 1947 trip.14

After their release, former-COs such as Dellinger, DiGia and Sutherland also launched the Committee for Non-violent Revolution (CNVR). Two years later, in 1948, they regrouped with additional radical pacifists such as Muste and MacDonald, changing their name to Peacemakers.15 In the late 1940s, many radical pacifists continued to maintain membership in the Socialist Party. Differences between anarchists and socialists involved with CNVR and Peacemakers were subsumed under the mantle of an emerging politics of revolutionary non-violence. The abstract question of whether a stateless society was possible, and what it would look like, took a back seat. However, members of both groups determined that ‘decentralized democratic socialism,’ a version of worker self-management, was their economic ideal and agreed that direct action, rather than electoral campaigns, should be the primary means used to force a fundamental transformation of the modern war-making nation-state. Peacemakers also sought to synthesise socialist and anarchist models of organisation: the group structured itself as a network of small cells that elected a steering committee, but operated autonomously from one another in pursuit of the organisation’s defined goals. Sympathisers were encouraged to join and participate as small groups, rather than as individuals. As historian Scott

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