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This book is about nonviolent direct action, a movement or perhaps more accurately a node linking a number of movements in the United States in the late 1970s and the 1980s. In each of these movements there has been a radical wing made up of people who believe in nonviolence, engage in political action through affinity groups, practice decision making by consensus, and employ the tactic of mass civil disobedience.

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Political Protest and Cultural Revolution

University of California Press

This book is about nonviolent direct action, a movement or perhaps more accurately a node linking a number of movements in the United States in the late 1970s and the 1980s. In each of these movements there has been a radical wing made up of people who believe in nonviolence, engage in political action through affinity groups, practice decision making by consensus, and employ the tactic of mass civil disobedience. The politics of direct action addresses a series of issues. Formulated first in the protest against nuclear power, it has spread to the peace movement, the ecology movement, the women's and gay and lesbian movements, the anti-intervention movement. The direct action wings of these movements have been loosely held together by a shared ideology that combines feminism, ecology, a form of anarchism that rests on grass roots democracy, and a leaning toward spirituality. In each of the issue-based movements in which it has appeared, nonviolent direct action has involved building community and trying to realize radically egalitarian values within the movement itself. Because direct action is as much about a particular social vision (and the practice of community building) as it is about the particular issues it has taken on, it has influenced the thinking of activists throughout the movements of the 1970s and 1980s.

I became involved in the direct action movement in 1983, after it was well under way. In June of that year I found myself in jail along with roughly a thousand other people who had blocked the road in front of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the University of California's nuclear weapons research facility, about fiftymiles southeast of Oakland. The blockade had been organized by the Livermore Action Group (LAG), a San Francisco Bay Area organization with affiliated groups throughout Northern California dedicated to closing down Livermore and challenging the arms race through nonviolent direct action. I had also been among 1,300 people arrested at a previous LAG action the year before, but that time I did not go to jail; that time demonstrators were given the choice between signing police citations and receiving a fine or going to jail for a couple of nights, without further prosecution.

At the 1983 action I intended to go to jail rather than "cite out," but I expected that the experience would be similar to that of the year before and that I would be out of jail in two days at the most. This time, however, the judge decided to try to break the movement by keeping us in jail as long as possible. For the first three days no one was allowed to bail out except for medical reasons. We were then told that we could come to arraignment and receive sentences of two years' probation, restraining our participation in further civil disobedience. Most of us opted to stay in jail, holding out for eleven days, until we won an agreement that there would be no probation.

Mass jail experiences can be terrible or wonderful. Either people cannot get along with one another and agree about how to behave or what demands to make, and tensions escalate, or they work well together and an atmosphere of militant community builds. The jail experience of 1983 was of the latter sort. A spirit of solidarity emerged that sustained everyone through eleven days of uncertainty and difficult conditions: terrible food, sleep disturbed by lights and the guards' constant talk, cold nights without enough blankets. In the already overflowing Santa Rita Prison, circus tents were set up for us on the prison grounds, the women's tents by the freeway, the men's tents perhaps a quarter of a mile farther back. Because we had not yet been arraigned, we had access to telephones, a right that is lost after one has been arraigned and sentenced to a period in jail. Two banks of pay telephones, one on the women's side, one on the men's, allowed us to arrive at common strategies and to communicate with the outside world.

Anyone who planned to be arrested was required to take part in nonviolence training, a day-long workshop introducing participants to the movement's consensus decision-making process and teaching nonviolent responses to potential provocations. The workshops gave inexperienced members a short course in the movement's methods and language and a means of becoming part of an affinity group of ten to fifteen people, the movement's basic unit. Membership in an affinity group was a prerequisite for taking part in the blockade; most of the affinity groups that participated had existed for some time in this and the earlier antinuclear movement. Members of established affinity groups were already likely to know each other well; newly formed groups got to know one another quickly in jail. The affinity groups provided a context for talking issues through; they also served as a brake on disruptive impulses that might have emerged if we had gone through the jail experience as individuals rather than members of small groups of people responsible to one another.

In jail, affinity groups were organized by clusters. The clusters were not necessarily huge, because most affinity groups formed outside jail included men and women, and not everyone in a group participated in every action. Thus many groups had only a few members present in the jail. Whenever a decision had to be made (often several times a day) the clusters would meet to work out their views and arrive at consensus. Anyone who disagreed strongly with a collective decision had the right to block it, although it was understood that this power should not be used unless a fundamental moral issue was at stake. Each cluster sent a "spokes" to a "spokescouncil" that met with the clusters; runners were sent between clusters and spokescouncil, bringing questions to be addressed to the clusters and conveying the decisions to the spokes-council. Spokes were rotated daily, so as to discourage the emergence of a leading group. But although there was no formal leadership, there was an informal group of people who were in fact looked to for leadership and who spent a good deal of time meeting among themselves and with others, trying to avoid problems and facilitate the operation of what we were coming to call the peace camp in the tents. When we were not meeting in our clusters or affinity groups, there were workshops and seminars on everything from how to fold paper cranes to the history of the Cold War. Some people spent a good deal of their time sunbathing. In the evenings, there were talent shows; on Emma Goldman's birthday, we held a party. First there were presentations about Emma Goldman's life and the history of anarchism, and then we danced to drum music improvised on empty aluminum storage cans.

But the authorities never left us to our own devices for very long. Twice a day the guards would round us up and herd us into one of the tents, where we would sit with out clusters in case quick decisions were needed. The sheriff would then appear at the front of the tent and announce through a bullhorn that the court was open and the judge was waiting for us to present ourselves for arraignment. Each time several women would leave the tent to board the bus for the court; our spokeswoman would then go to the front of the tent and present the refusal of the rest of us, pointing out that we had not yet been offered a satisfactory sentence. The same scene was played out simultaneously on the men's side.