Protest

During the late '50s and '60s, heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and of the Committee of 100, Vernon Richards was as usual writing editorials for Freedom, the London anarchist weekly. Like other British anarchists he also found time to take part--without illusions--in marches and sit-downs, and he wrote about them. Noticing that illusions of yore now seem to be illusions again, he has assembled, for present reflection, under the title Protest Without Illusions, a collection of his earlier pieces.*

Although Richards' commentary on the nuclear disarmament movement was sharply critical of its "illusions," the spirit of this volume is not negative or sour. The spirit reveals itself most clearly in the three dozen photographs included here, taken by Richards at various demonstrations. His camera did not seek out the confrontations; it enjoyed the "interesting and beautiful faces of serious and smiling protesters," their easy informality, the youthfulness of young and middle aged and old. If revolution, there is to be, not the grim authoritarian revolution, this is where it begins, does it not?

On the title-page there appears a quotation from Bertrand Russell (1959). Cited in a number of Richards' articles, it is thematic in this collection:

It is not enough to ban nuclear weapons. If you ban nuclear weapons completely, and even destroy all the existing stock, they will be manufactured if war breaks out. . .. We must work towards some system which will prevent war. It requires a different outlook and a different way of viewing all the affairs of men from any that has been in the world before.

Russell did not, of course, mean this as an anarchist would. When the philosopher, unpredictable in politics as in philosophy, abandoned the Committee of 100, Richards was hardly surprised: "Russell is an autocrat, a believer in the most centralized form of government" -namely, world-government. (Richards is also short on trust of intellectuals who remain attached to privilege and rank. So there is another quotation on the title-page-from Thoreau.) For Richards, "working towards" would be social revolution, which one should not expect to be nonviolent, "some system" would be a society without government and capitalism and therefore without war. There would be no illusion that this would be easy or that anything less would do.

This reading of the Russell quotation explains why Richards criticized the antinuclear campaign for limiting itself to nuclear disarmament, for hoping that the government, perhaps a Labor government, would heed sensible demands and sound reasons, and for believing that nuclear weapons are an isolated pathology rather than normal in, integral to, a capitalist and statist world. Richards:

We are not criticizing the CND for not having managed to rid the country of its nuclear armament. We do criticize them for treating what are virtually revolutionary proposals as if they could be dealt with as simple questions of policy, rather like wage restraint, or the decision to tax lollipops. Unilateral disarmament implies that a nation, or a people, are substituting moral values for power values. This means upsetting the whole economic structure: it means an end to privilege, it requires the decentralization of power. In a word it is the social revolution as anarchists understand it. And you cannot legislate for revolution; you have to make it.

Antinuclear people are now debating earnestly whether a weapons "freeze" may be a desirable objective - at a level of weaponry virtually unimaginable twenty years ago. The appeal--Richards was and is severely critical of this--is appeal to fear, doom-dread - but the people I meet know well enough that nuclear weapons can kill us all and they have chosen to entrust their fate to their government and to believe that safety demands multiplication of the arsenal. No more fear of dying than in macho courage is there solid foundation. What is needed is that more people become so conscious of the potentialities of life and living they they will resent "selling their labor" to a boss, will hate authority and the social system based on it. Then they will resist war not because they are afraid to die but because they believe in life.

The serious and smiling faces, again.

Is the anarchist goal one more illusion? Hoping not to misrepresent Richards, I would answer: We "protest" without the illusions that such movements generate; we protest because we cannot not; our protest takes many forms, not all newsworthy; our purpose is not to persuade or dissuade governments but to encourage our neighbors to think, act, and live differently; we had better do this for its immediate rewards; if there really is no way for human beings to achieve a radically different form of living, we are in Hell.

In his preface to this volume Richards expresses the view that nuclear power, not the weaponry, now represents the greater danger. Agree or disagree: but it is well to remember that the answers that seem most obvious are most likely to be wrong. Richards has never believed that the people in power are mad, as the conventional pacifist wisdom seems to hold. Is it not clearly in their interest to keep us all jittery? A nuclear war would be good neither for business nor for preservation of power and privilege; new weapons and a huge "defense" budget are not only good for business but necessary to it. In the nuclear power protests Richards finds hope for something positive. I would not disagree, although more crucial to the human future than the success or failure of these campaigns are the consequences, hard to foresee, of the world economic crisis, in which not only the "capitalist" sphere is implicated. If anarchist ideas have validity, they will be rediscovered by people who have never heard of anarchism but have decided that they had better begin to take charge of their own lives.

David Wieck

*Published last year by Freedom Press, Protest Without Illusions is available for $4.20, postage included, from Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High St., London El. Subscriptions to Freedom (now fortnightly), at the same address: $25.00 per year. Richards is best known for his Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1953, revised 1972), a vindication of anarchist methods.