By Howard J. Ehrlich

An anti-war movement is not by itself a movement toward peace. Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is a process, not an event. It is a mode of organizing and a way of life. War is an event; it ends with a truce, a surrender or a defeat. Protesting the war or such activities as the breach of disarmament treaties, the storage of nuclear and chemical weaponry, the use of depleted uranium artillery, sowing land mines, or other forms of militarism amounts to treating symptoms. It will help in reducing or preventing much suffering and physical damage, but it does not necessarily move us forward. In fact, the side effects of the “war against terrorism” have already weakened and will continue to weaken the libertarian strands of the fabric of American society.

An antiwar movement is an activist and oppositional movement. Its motive force is reformist: to stop the war. While its tactics may include civil disobedience and direct action, antiwar coalitions are seldom directed at fundamental social changes. Large coalitions are often good at creating spectacles, rallies and demonstrations, and other transient forms of protest. They tend to be poor at recruiting since they often have a small, hierarchical base. People come and go to its activities, sometimes staying on but more often becoming isolated or burning out. Generally, they are “staffed” by career activists who are paid by some larger organization to be politically involved, by members of small revolutionary groups which may be coalition members, or by people whose socioeconomic status allows them the time to do movement work. They may be students, declassed and marginal individuals, or people supported by others. Their common threads are, of course, their revulsion to the war, their humanitarianism, and their discretionary time.

Antiwar coalitions have no theory of society or social change. Their “membership” is typically mired in a liberal capitalism and sometimes a vaguely democratic socialism. To the extent that they do articulate a theory of change it is a fuzzy meliorism, that is, a belief that the world is getting better with the help of good people acting together. They see electoral politics as the major mechanism for this betterment.

The “mission statements” of coalitions are righteous, calling for an end to the war, aid to its victims, opposing political repression and ethnoviolence, and endorsing a vaguely articulated demand for social justice. Typically their demands are not only beyond their own power, but are often beyond the intellectual grasp or imagination of those in power.

Coalitions tend to endorse nonviolence in their tactics of protest, though not necessarily as a philosophical tenet of their mission statement. Given the philosophical ambiguity of “violence” and “nonviolence,” serious political disagreements about the meaning of “direct action” and “civil disobedience,” and their relation to nonviolence, movement organizers often stretch for the lowest denominator in order to hold a coalition together, creating an obvious, basic tension in the organizing of protests.

The overarching problem of the peace movement – if not American politics – is the failure to move beyond what is to what could be. It is most of all a failure of imagination. But it is also indicative of an underlying fear of change.

This is a popular war, and most people, including many who have been generally appalled by war, see this one as unavoidable if not “just.” Its acceptance is built upon the more sordid dimensions of American national character: authoritarianism, individualism, anti-intellectualism, patriarchy and ethnocentrism. It has led to a closed-mindedness and level of political ignorance that makes organizing more difficult and weakens any commitment to democracy.

On the way to peace, we have four critical tasks. We need to increase the density of symbols of opposition. Through demonstrations and vigils, handouts and graffiti, through independent media centers and infoshops, fundraisers and socials, through wearing buttons and talking it up, by civil disobedience and direct action – through every means in redundance – we need to display to people everywhere that there is a dedicated opposition to the present policies of war. The challenge in doing so is to not repeat the same actions again and again, and to not lose sight of our basic goal of political education.

On the way to peace we need to delegitimize authority. The glue holding society together is part predictability – the belief that people and the world in its everyday operation are understandable and more or less repetitive. Another part is the belief system that rationalizes the state as being just. The sense that justice will prevail, that this is a just society, is critical to the suppression of revolutionary ideas.

Bureaucracy is the organizational form for masking injustice; the mass media of education and entertainment are the primary forms for the idealization of the society as just; and the spectacle of caring leaders and the deserving rich puts a human face on breeches of the predictable and the just. Institutional religion soothes the victims of injustice and deflects their needs through ritual and the pursuit of an afterlife. These are our targets, that is, the authorities and representatives of these institutions of pacification. Their mission, in this war on terrorism, is to convince the public that the war is just, that the sacrifice of civil liberties is part of that pursuit of justice, and that we can trust them to do what is in our best interest. Our mission is to deflate their authority by convincing the public that they are not honest or competent, and that their motivations are directed to the accumulation of wealth for the wealthy and power for the powerful.

On the way to peace, we need to oppose capitalism. As a political economic system, capitalism requires the concentration of power to protect itself and its markets. It requires, too, the constant expansion of its markets and its profits. Capitalism protects itself through the co-optation of alternatives and through violence.

The battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda is in no small part a struggle for control of the oil and gas reserves around the Caspian Sea basin. This battle for resources also entails a battle for the maintenance and expansion of U.S. bases in Central Asia and the Middle East to protect the flow of oil and to maintain military dominance. It is also a war, like all wars, that enriches the military and defense contractors and those who profit from the weapons trade. An anticapitalist program for the peace movement would include: ending the arms trade, halting the new Star Wars program, agreeing to the elimination of nuclear weapons and chemical-biological weapons, the end to land mine production, and the conversion of war industries to production which met human needs.

Finally, the anticapitalist peace movement must have a clear economic program. This would include the building of alternative institutions such as food co-ops, infoshops, local exchange and trading systems, co-housing and communal housing arrangements. A peace movement must also be a movement for worker-community ownership and control. This is a central direction for a noncapitalist economics.

On the way to peace, we need to reinvent anarchy. The anarchist moment exists within antiwar coalitions particularly with regard to decision-making and group process. The components of that process include diffusing the concentration of power within the group; maximizing individual participation; decision-making by consensus or other non-hierarchical process; deflating elitism – sexism, racism, ageism and all other forms of authoritarianism; and a program of education.

Anarchists share much in common with Marxists and Liberals with regard to a critique of this war and the institutions of society. One serious point of departure, which is central to a peace movement and absent from the antiwar movements, is the utopianism in anarchist thought. The antiwar movement calls for an end to the barbarism and for the beginning of a new society.

Building a movement requires, particularly, that there be attainable goals. The peace movement needs to have a sketch of a peaceable society. Without it, it is just an oppositional movement with no necessary life beyond its points of opposition. A sketch is a sketch, but it does give us a sense of direction. We need to ask ourselves what a good society would look like. What would it take to move from here to there?

There is, of course, a next step – a leap. And here we separate many, certainly the utopians from the “realists.” It is a step from sketch to performance. Is what we are doing now leading us to a good society? Do we have the courage and the imagination to act as if we were engaged in that new society? If we do, we will discover that there is no way to peace. As radical activist A.J. Muste put it, “peace is the way.”

Howard J. Ehrlich is the editor of Social Anarchism. Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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