Brian Tokar, Pump Handle Vandals affinity group

In mid-spring of last year, after the accident at Three Mile Island, a couple of dozen antinuclear activists began regular meetings in Boston to discuss the possibility of organizing a direct action occupation against the Seabrook nuclear power plant. Our vision involved much more than simply organizing a single direct action in 1979; we hoped to permanently shift the emphasis of the antinuclear movement from primarily symbolic to direct action. Many of us were also seeking to evolve an entirely new approach to antinuclear action, one which would break the hegemony of liberal "environmentalist" politics within the movement and replace the tendency toward increasingly bureaucratic, centralized organization with a new, revolutionary model of autonomous collectives of people working together to stop the nuke ourselves. We believed that an effective direct action would help to broaden the social base of the antinuclear movement beyond the white, college-educated constituency that had come to dominate it, and also expand active participation by local residents of the New Hampshire/Massachusetts seacoast area in antinuke activities.

The May 24 direct action at Seabrook was in many ways the culmination of the effort begun last spring. We did the Oct. 6 occupation attempt, created a viable direct action network throughout the US antinuclear movement, and analyzed at least the tactical errors of our first effort in the planning and execution of the May action. The political perspective and the contents of our vision have been disseminated across the US and thousands of new activists have had their first experience with direct action methods and with the difficulties of police confrontation. Local opposition to the Seabrook nukes has been strengthened, and the financial status of Public Service Company (PSCo) has deteriorated further through a process exacerbated by our action. (One nuclear executive was quoted by the Boston Globe last October, saying that if he were working for the utilities, the October 6 direct action would cause him to reconsider any further nuclear commitments.)

But in many ways, we have failed in our responsibility to the antinuclear movement and to the larger movement for revolutionary changes. The antinuclear movement is as divided as ever on the issue of direct action and many activists who claim to share our overall political vision consider our actions to have been counterproductive. Despite our close ties to many people in Seabrook, the State has largely succeeded in portraying us as an outside invading force and in playing upon people's deeply inculcated beliefs in private property and State power. Our own organization failed to grow substantially between November and April, and all of our accumulated organizing experience was insufficient to attract more people to the May action; in fact several Coalition groups substantially decreased in size from last fall, and at least two regions lost several affinity groups (AG's) in the weeks leading up to May 24.

Why have we so sorely failed to live up to the expectations we have created for ourselves over the past year? Why has it been so difficult to interest antinuclear people in direct action? I believe that the answer lies in three areas: our tactics and our overemphasis thereupon in our organizing; our overall organizing approach, and its questionable effect on the people we do reach; and the slow political evolution of our local support in Seabrook.

TACTICS: The outcome of our months of tactical planning for May 24 can be summarized in three words: we were outnumbered. Our persistence in tactical planning and our public statements affirming the seriousness of our intentions produced such an extreme overreaction that 700-900 State Police, Seabrook Police (which in the last 6 months have become essentially an appendage to the New Hampshire State Police force) and National Guard were mobilized against us. Still, we cost the State and PSCo over $750,000 and the acting Attorney General admitted to there being several occasions when the situation was not felt to be under their control. Gov. Gallen was quoted in the press saying that they'd rather deal with a large, disorganized crowd (Oct. 6?) than a smaller, highly organized one. By comparison, it took only 50 State Troopers to disperse 20,000 rioting bikers in Laconia two weeks later.

Despite the basic impossibility of stopping construction with the numbers we had, affinity groups and regional clusters of affinity groups showed an impressive level of tactical creativity in confusing the police, evading arrest and maintaining the assault against the plant for at least the first 2 days. Saturday night's meeting of cluster spokespeople reflected the highest level of agreement I have ever seen in the midst of a major action, and Sat. and Sun. were a rather hopeful microcosm (albeit only a microcosm) of the possibility of mutually supportive tactical coordination among groups carrying out several different styles of action. Although this process totally broke down amidst Monday's demoralization, many people from different parts of the country left their campsites excited about the possibility of trying again.

However, in discussing tactics, it is equally important to consider the thousands of people who stayed away because they thought the action was futile, because they feared police violence or thought we were too "violent," or because they felt they had already paid their dues at Seabrook and are now too busy working in their own local areas. On the other hand, there are many people who assert that they would be attracted by a higher level of militancy, and express astonishment at our unwillingness to plan our actions more secretively (i.e., not announcing the date publicly) and to employ incendiaries and explosives. Both attitudes strike me as essentially naive and escapist, and reflect a poor understanding of the role of social movements in creating political changes. Yet the issue of nuclear power, as removed as it is from most people's daily lives, continues to engender such attitudes.

ORGANIZING APPROACH AND METHODS: Our major problems in organizing for May 24 are a direct result of the rather abstracted attitudes many people hold toward the nuclear menace. This, in turn, is a reflection of the rather narrow social base (often confused by marxist types with their "class base") of the antinuclear movement. People whose primary vehicle of politicization has been the antinuclear movement tend to come from relatively comfortable family backgrounds and have generally spent some years in college. When such people become radicalized, it is often from a rather far-reaching rejection of the hollowness of middle class life; such people become philosophical anarchists far more often than their counterparts who became radicalized in struggles against primarily economic oppression. However, their political practice has tended to reflect an unwillingness to take actions that compromise their basically comfortable existence and their entrenched attitudes toward the State and private property. This is the basic dilemma of the direct action antinuclear movement--people with rather well-developed understandings of the depth of the ecological crisis and of the need to develop new ways of life and new forms of human relationships appear unwilling to employ anything but the most passive forms of action in standing up for their professed beliefs.

This dilemma continually plagued our organizing for the May 24 occupation/blockade. There were some limited successes in attracting people outside the conventional antinuclear crowd, and most of those people were attracted to May 24 on the basis of the style of the action itself rather than the issue of nuclear power. However, most of them had been previously active in other political movements and tended, from my experience, to see the struggle against Seabrook as somewhat of a distraction from their "real" work. As a result of our inability to either catalyze mainstream antinukers toward direct action or attract a broader constituency beyond the traditional antinuclear constituency, CDAS (the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook) as a collective whole became more isolated from the people we had been trying to reach than we were before we began planning for May 24.

Why have we made so little progress in transcending these social obstacles? This is just as much a question of our own collective style of organizing as of the intrinsic limitations we face. Although the Handbook presented a clear political and social perspective, which followed directly from our larger visions of new forms of collective, participatory action, the day-to-day practice of most CDAS groups largely failed to actualize this vision. We never really convinced many new people of the viability of direct action or carried on the kind of educational work that could help people transcend their fears of confrontation. Instead of helping new people to understand how they could contribute fully to the action and make it theirs, we reinforced our own isolation by treating many people who walked in the door without already agreeing with the Handbook as outsiders rather than as potential participants.

This problem was most serious in Boston, where May 24 was the first major antinuclear action ever that didn't greatly swell the ranks of activists. In fact, there were fewer active participants in the Boston chapter of CDAS in April than there were in November. As the collective of core organizers became smaller, it became more insular, making it more difficult for new people to become involved. At the time when it was most important to be open and tolerant of people with differing views, the Boston collective, at the height of burnout, evolved a degree of rigidity and intolerance in our organizing style, interpersonal relations and attitudes toward other people rivaled only by explicitly "democratic centralist" organizations. Other regions, in which the bulk of the organizers were not involved in CDAS from the beginning, had to rationalize and apologize for condescending behavior on the part of CDAS "heavies" toward newer activists.

In Seabrook itself, the problem was not so pathological. A group of a dozen Coalition members had arrived in mid-April to establish the "Freestate" community, an ongoing community of organizers created to lay the groundwork for May 24 and to maintain a presence in the Seabrook area throughout the summer. The Freestate was to be "an opportunity to begin to realize our ideals of community self-sufficiency, cooperation and mutual aid, while planting the seeds of a new culture of open resistance to the nuclear state in all its forms." However, the State responded immediately with a concerted campaign of intimidation against the Freestate and our supporting landowners, seriously damaging the solidarity of the community, forcing us to relocate ourselves often and impairing the ability of most of the original Freestate Task Force members to work openly and cooperatively with people who arrived in the last weeks before May 24. Many of the most committed activists left Seabrook shortly after the May 24 weekend, the community became increasingly overridden by street people of all origins, and the Freestate was compelled to dissolve within two weeks under mounting threats of local commercial interests and "rednecks."

One indicator, or perhaps a cause of our inability to present a compelling social vision of direct action, was our organization's rather ambiguous attitude toward the ideas of feminism. While some of the best organizing for May 24, especially in Boston, was carried out by the women's caucus, working within the women's community, I also observed more overt hostility to the ideas of feminism among Boston CDAS people than I had seen anywhere in 10 years of political activity. By feminism, I mean more than discussions of the need to equalize men's and women's roles in the organization and of superficial aspects of sexist relationships among participants in the action. I am referring to the vision of a total transformation of interpersonal relations among all people which has been advanced by the growing anarchist sector of the feminist movement. I am referring to the elimination of all forms of hierarchy, domination, competition and unequal relations of power in all spheres of daily life as a process that is intimately tied to their elimination from the larger political and social sphere. It is only through such a process that we can come to understand the true nature of direct action as not merely a set of tactics, but as a mode of total social transformation and revolution.

LOCAL ORGANIZING IN SEABROOK: The May 24 direct action appears to have significantly advanced a process of political polarization that has been occurring in Seabrook for many years. Since the opening of the greyhound-racing track ten years ago, and probably earlier still, there has been a deepening split between natives and "transplants," i.e., between a rural people struggling to maintain a lifestyle based upon close personal relations with fellow townspeople and their treasured natural surroundings on the one hand, and the forces of development, suburbanization, and massive infusions of outside capital on the other. It is the natives, who now constitute only about one third of the population of Seabrook, that are the most vocal supporters of the antinuclear movement in general and CDAS in particular, whereas recent imports are more divided on the nuclear issue and much more hostile to our methods.

For all our efforts to cultivate our local support in Seabrook in the 2 years since the June 1978 Clamshell sellout (in which a planned civil disobedience action was turned into a legal rally and music festival through the behind-the-scenes machinations of self-proclaimed Clamshell "leaders" from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Montague, Mass., and the Boston American Friends Service Committee headquarters), and for all the depth of conviction expressed by local antinukers, our local support has remained rather passive. There has been more direct participation by locals in support activities for our action--gathering food and clothing donations, seeking land commitments, media statements, lobbying the selectmen, etc.--than in the early days of Clamshell, but we have yet to begin to evolve the sort of explicit on-the-streets support for direct action that has been so essential to the successes of antinuclear direct action in Europe.

On May 24, we saw for the first time a visible presence of local residents, mostly adolescents, but also several older citizens, in the midst of the action itself. The most dramatic example was Saturday's flying-leap rescue of a Coalition member from Connecticut from police attacks. But the other side was far more vocal than our supporters in reaching the media and the general public with their story. Every major newspaper in New Hampshire and both Boston dailies had a feature story on Monday morning about the sorry plight of the Rt. 1 businesspeople (80% of which are from out of town) and all the money they lost over the May 24 weekend. However, when several local supporters of the action rose to make a statement during Monday morning's Coalition press conference, many of the major media got up and left.

Our supporters in Seabrook share some of our current pessimism about the future of the movement against the nuke, but there is some hope that the circumstances surrounding the State's response to us will help in their own organizing efforts. Seabrook people are still quite upset about the anti-camping and assembly ordinances imposed in early May without a town vote; next spring promises a major effort to have them revoked at the annual town meeting. A similar concern is the nature of the town police force, which has been taken over by the State in the past 6 months and which has taken to harassing high school people on the streets when we're not around to provide appropriate targets.

The Freestate Task Force arrived in Seabrook in April to discover that no one had ever mounted a serious community organizing effort in Seabrook, and we were unable to do so as a result of our endless land hassles and police harassment. A plethora of local issues?the nuke, the dog track and its effects on the nearby reservoir, the auto parts plant, chemical waste dumping by the Schwinn bicycle plant and others, the destruction (by PSCo) of Rocky Brook (a pond adjacent to one of our camping areas), the granting of permission to Perini Construction to use the high school ball field this summer while students are forbidden from using it, etc.?all point to a steady deterioration of the quality of life in the town, which natives are highly conscious of as a systematic effort by outsiders to rob them of their way of life. It is up to us to help our friends in Seabrook translate their frustrations into action in time to stop the nuke from going on line. There's not much time left, as the first of the two Seabrook reactors approaches 50% completion.

THE FUTURE OF THE DIRECT ACTION MOVEMENT: The past two actions at Seabrook have provoked many people to consider for the first time the reality of direct action as an essential vehicle for political change. However, the combination of our own organizational ineptness and the unwillingness of most antinuclear people to take actions that could risk their usually comfortable lifestyles leaves us rather isolated within the New England antinuclear movement. There is cause for serious doubt as to whether we can change this within the confines of the antinuclear movement per se. On the other hand, the example of direct action at Seabrook may be extremely important in the development of strategies to combat other issues of more immediate concern to most people, such as the draft, the threat of war in the Middle East, and a variety of economic issues. For many people becoming involved in these struggles, the antinuclear movement has been the source of their earliest political experiences and should be a source of inspiration for direct action efforts in other areas.

How can we as a group facilitate this process? How can we spread the process of direct action, maintain and broaden our direct action network, and learn from our mistakes without being perceived as missionaries (or worse as parasites) toward other existing movements? In the months since May 24, different groups of Coalition members have tried to begin addressing these issues on their own, through work in the anti-draft and feminist movements, and a variety of community-oriented efforts around New England. The specific issue of nuclear power, with all its apparent limitations, has been put aside by many direct action-oriented people for now, though local work in lower New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts continues and resistance to the laying of high-voltage power lines throughout New England looms on the horizon. People are reassessing the limitations of both mass-scale organizing and single-issue organizing as vehicles for the proliferation of libertarian approaches to organization and social action. We are trying to understand how CDAS, with our professed commitment to personal empowerment and anti-hierarchical principles, degenerated into a rather anonymous "mass" organization for the bulk of the participants in many regions. There remained a higher level of personal involvement in the day-to-day work and decisions of the organization than in any other "mass" organization in recent memory, including the Clamshell Alliance, but at least my standards were very much higher.

The mounting social and political crises we face in every sphere of our daily lives should provide new opportunities to peer beyond the limits of traditional organizing. The experience of the antinuclear movement has helped to provide some focus for what appears to be an increasing rejection by widening circles of people of State and corporate intrusions into every corner of their daily lives. Both the ecological and feminist movements have catalyzed the growth and proliferation of new forms of decentralist, anti-hierarchical organization, based around the models of the Spanish anarchist affinity group. The next several months should provide some important clues as to whether these trends can form the basis for an evolving antiauthoritarian social movement in the decade ahead.