REVOLUTIONARY NONVIOLENCE - WITH THANKS TO MILAN RAI, NOAM CHOMSKY, AJ MUSTE, AND PETER LE MARE

Milan Rai is nearly 60. I have come to appreciate him through his work over the last seventeen years as editor of Peace News, the newspaper I used to sell on the corner of Carfax in Oxford on Saturday mornings in 1968 and 1969 as a member of the Oxford University Peace Action Group. In September this year he wrote his editorial goodbye:

'I first bought, and started selling, Peace News when I was at school. Its vision of revolutionary anarcha-feminist nonviolence has had a deep and lasting impact on me.

It has been an enormous honour to have been co-editor, with Emily Johns, and then the sole editor of PN. Emily, you’re a star. 17 years have flown by.

It has also been an honour to be the first sole editor of colour.

I’m so glad to have carried the banner of revolutionary nonviolence alongside Emily, Emma Sangster and Gabriel Carlyle and, earlier on, Claire Poyner, Rebecca Dale, Nik Górecki and John Mcallister. I’m grateful to Ippy and to all the previous PN staff for having built the paper and for having kept this show on the road.'

Milan Rai

Milan Rai had earned his credentials as a nonviolent activist:

Rai first became politically active in the campaign against Pershing II and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles - nuclear weapons scheduled to be deployed in Western Europe in the late 1980s.

Along with fellow activist Maya Evans, he was arrested on 25 October 2005 next to the Cenotaph war memorial in London, for refusing to cease reading aloud the names of

civilians by then killed in Iraq in the course of the Iraq war.

Rai was convicted under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA) for organising an illegal demonstration in the vicinity of Parliament.

In December 2006, Rai and Evans lost an appeal against their convictions. For refusing to pay a fine of £350 (and £150 court costs), Rai was sent to Wandsworth prison in south London for 14 days on 23 August 2007.^[2][3] This was his fourth prison sentence. Previous prison sentences (14 days in Pentonville in 1995, seven days in Wormwood Scrubs in 1996, and 28 days in Lewes in 2005) were all imposed for similar protests.

Also taken into account in his 2007 sentencing was a further fine of £100, imposed for organising and participating in protests during the "No More Fallujahs" tent city demonstration in Parliament Square. Rai's fine for these offences was imposed in May 2007 - Maya Evans was his co-defendant. Evans is best known for being the first person to be convicted of participating in an unauthorized demonstration in the vicinity of Parliament under SOCPA. Rai was the first person to be convicted of organizing an unauthorized demonstration in the vicinity of Parliament. Evans and Rai were also, through their May 2007 convictions, the first people to be convicted in the same trial of organizing and participating in unauthorized demonstrations in the vicinity of Parliament - at different parts of the same two-day event. 

He and three other members of the Peace News staff resigned this autumn when they found themselves in dispute with the chair of Peace News Trustees and other trustees. I know which side I'm on in this dispute. These four brave activists sacrificed their redundancy pay worth over £17,000 when they resigned to tell their readers what had been going on behind the scenes. I'm glad to say readers have launched a fund that has filled that gap.

Milan paid tribute to a number of people in his resignation letter, alive and those who have passed. Peter Le Mare's name was one of the departed. I knew Peter for two or three years before his death in 2019; he was an inspirational Quaker peace activist in Cornwall; a man of principle and passion who attended peace camps across the country and the annual CND conference, hitching his way to these events. Jeremy Corbyn and Bruce Kent were among his friends. 

Peter Le Mare (1940-2019)

In that last edition of Peace News, dated August-September 2024, Milan published a long article under the heading Big Idea which he titled: Revolutionary Nonviolence. Here is a summary of this piece:

• The US radical pacifist, AJ Muste, is a key inspiration for Milan. In 1928, Muste wrote an essay: 'Pacifism and class war' in which he argued that 'In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist'. 
• He argued that '...the economic, social, political order in which we live was built up largely by violence, is now being extended by violence, and is maintained only by violence'. 
• Therefore, Muste reasoned, the task of the pacifist is 'to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil - material and spiritual - this entails for the masses of people throughout the world; and to exhort all rulers in social, political, industrial life, all who occupy places of privilege, all who are the beneficiaries of the present state of things, to relinquish every attempt to hold on to wealth, position and power by force, to give up the instruments of violence on which they annually spend billions of wealth produced by the sweat and anguish of the toilers'. 
• For Milan Rai, nearly one hundred years ago AJ Muste laid the foundations for the revolutionary nonviolent tradition. But it is very important to emphasize what this way of making sense is not. Muste and other radicals in this tradition are not urging us to pile up barricades in the streets today and try to overthrow the government tomorrow. They urge much smaller changes in the here-and-now. 

AJ Muste (1885-1967) - American radical clergyman

• Noam Chomsky is a radical activist with a distinguished academic background who has consistently pointed out that we don't have the kinds of moral and political outlooks in the numbers we would need to lead to fundamental change. The just goals that we are trying to attain cannot be achieved within the existing institutional structures because they will be beaten back by violence. 
• Chomsky says our focus for now should be on trying to 'expand the the floor of the cage', a phrase which he takes from rural workers' organizations in Brazil. In this image, the state is the cage which oppresses us as well as shielding us. Popular movements need to protect the cage as far as the government programmes and powers that benefit us - and at the same time expand the floor of the cage by increasing democratic control over the state and improving public services. These are the necessary preliminaries. We have no option but to build a powerful radical movement which one day may be the instrument of the change we want for everyone. 
• But before we can build a mass radical movement, Chomsky argued in 1971, we will need a mass reform movement: 'a movement devoted to badly needed reforms, anti- imperialist and anti-militarist, concerned with guaranteeing minimal standards of health, income, education, industrial safety and conditions of work, and overcoming urban decay and rural misery'. Milan Rai comments: 'Today, we might add 'creating a Just Transition out of the climate crisis' among other minimum goals.' 

Noam Chomsky - US radical academic and activist 

• For Chomsky, this is how a mass revolutionary movement could develop without falling into the trap where a small group of leaders impose their 'truth' and 'the right strategy' on the movement - as happened in Soviet Russia under Lenin's vanguard leadership. 
• Chomsky takes aim at capitalism: 'The fundamental problem of capitalism is that it depends on the majority of people in society being excluded from wealth and power, and having to rent themselves out to the owning classes.' Power relations in the typical company are extremely authoritarian - they would be called fascist if they were found in the political sphere. You obey or you are out. Human beings are turned into tools. 

• Milan Rai concludes: 'A genuine movement of revolutionary nonviolence today will be grounded in the work of our pioneers, firmly anti-capitalist, aware of the many dimensions of oppression we are struggling with, committed to collective liberation, modest and ambitious at the same time, bold and cautious at the same time, dedicated to building a mass movement of deep reform and to expanding the floor of the cage - while preparing in our own small ways to dismantle it.' 

The challenge to my readers is simple - can you think of a good reason for not being part of this emerging revolutionary nonviolent movement? If not, what follows, for you?