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12 The Movement for a New Society Consensus, Prefiguration, and Direct Action ANDREW CORNELL The revolution for life confronts the old order, but confronts lies with openness and repression with community. It shows in its very style how different it is from the necrophilic American Empire. —George Lakey, Strategy for a Living Revolution, 1973 Throughout the first years of the 1970s, amid an array of political transformations on the Left, a cohort of young nonviolent militants worked to rejuvenate the tradition of radical pacifism in the United States by combining its core tenets with political and tactical innovations emerging from the struggles of the 1960s. This effort was most effectively realized in the Movement for a New Society (MNS), an organization founded in 1971 as a national network of collectives with a hub of more than one hundred members living cooperatively in Philadelphia. MNS transmitted the practice of revolutionary nonviolence from the 1960s to the 1990s, synthesizing it with ecology, feminism, and anarchism in the process. Though MNS is rarely remembered by name today, many of the new ways of doing radical politics that it promoted have become central to contemporary anti-authoritarian social movements. MNS popularized consensus decision making, introduced the spokes-council method of organization to activists in the United States, and was a leading advocate of “prefigurative” politics.1 Members of the organization substantially aided the antiwar, antinuclear, feminist, gay liberation, and ecology movements by organizing mass nonviolent direct actions, building support communities for activists, and providing political education and skills training to organizers involved in hundreds of grassroots efforts throughout the United States and the world. MNS insisted on a “macro” view of social relations that explained how different forms of injustice were linked, and sought to implement a multi-pronged revolutionary strategy combining its radical analysis with direct action and community building at a time when much of the movement was fracturing along lines 231 of identity and tactics. MNS’s holistic and personal approach to revolutionary change attracted many activists exhausted by the pace and disappointed by the shortcomings of 1960s efforts. However, when the political climate changed and members could no longer juggle the multiple aspects of their work as effectively, their cohesion, long-term vision, and influence began to wane, compelling the organization to disband in 1988. Radical Pacifism and the Movements of the 1960s MNS grew out of a Quaker antiwar organization in 1971, but it built on principles and traditions that radical pacifists had developed throughout the twentieth century. Beginning in the World War I period, radical pacifism constituted an alternative vision and method for making progressive social change to that of the traditional Left. Though pacifists believed in economic justice, and many belonged to the Socialist Party, class did not form the linchpin of their politics as it did for Marxists. Instead, pacifists sought a more generalized “fellowship” of humanity and an end to war and the social institutions—including capitalism—that they believed underlay the drive to war. Pacifists distinguished their methods from those of the major Left parties by insisting on a correlation between means and end, and by encouraging adherents to live in a fashion as similar as possible to the way they would live in the ideal society they were striving for.2 From the 1940s to the 1960s, radical pacifism was also colored by anarchism via the writings of the Dutch anarcho-pacifist Bart de Ligt and the antiwar activities of outspoken anarchists in the United States such as Ammon Hennacy, Paul Goodman, and the editors of the journal Retort.3 Radical pacifists drawn together by their experiences during World War II created the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942 and were important conduits of participatory deliberative styles and the tactics of Gandhian nonviolence to leaders of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) drew on SNCC’s participatory structure and the ethos of the counterculture to formulate two of the defining demands of the New Left: the implementation of a participatory democracy and the overcoming of alienating culture.4 Yet, in the later 1960s, both the black freedom movement and the student movement, smarting from repression on the one hand, and elated by radical victories at home and abroad on the other, moved away from this emergent, anarchistic political space that was distinguished from both liberalism and Marxism. If participatory democracy, prefigurative politics, and cultural transformation...

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