Suzanne Kryder talks with Anarcho Pacifism activist-scholar Dr. Joseph Llewellyn

SK: Dr. Llewellyn, some people know what the word “pacifism” means, but they’re never heard the word “anarcho-pacifism.” How are those terms, “pacifism” and “anarcho-pacifism” similar and different?

JL: It would help to define them briefly first. As many people know, pacifists reject war and think that it is inherently wrong. Pacifism is a rejection of mostly physical violence to achieve political goals and aims.

Anarchism on the other hand is defined more by its position against domination and exploitation. It focuses more on the rejection of structural and cultural violence which includes the balance of the states and the balance of capitalism.
           
Anarcho-pacifist would argue that if you follow each of those to their conclusion, they meet in the middle.
           
If anarchists reject domination, they should really reject physical violence because violence inherently dominates other people.
           
If Pacifists reject violence, it shouldn’t just be violence war or physical violence, but all forms of violence that can have damaging effects on people’s lives.
           
I’d say anarcho-pacifism is a political theory that comprehensively rejects violence.
           
On the other side, the positive side, it also puts an end to some people’s ability to live and thrive and make change without violence.

SK:  It seems really rare in the Western world to find a true, pure anarcho-pacifist. I have friends who say, “I hate capitalism. I hate the government. I hate corporations because they’re all domination and they call themselves “pacifists,” but it seems like if you own a car and you live in a house and you buy groceries, you’re supporting a corporation.
           
The question is, is there really a pure, true anarcho-pacifist?

JL: It’s an interesting question. It’s very hard to live purely by those ideals. As you say, the world is dominated by capitalism, governments and states.
           
I think anarcho-pacifists present in two types of action. One side of that in nonviolent resistance, which we’ve seen a lot of all over the world and increasing over the last few decades.
           
Another side that is key is experimentation in new ways of leading. Especially in Western capitalist states, it might be difficult to find space to true live by those ideals. Outside of the state, the anarcho-pacifists are trying to find ways to do things differently that allows us to operate more nonviolently as communities.
           
In terms of finding a pure anarcho-pacifist, being an anarcho-pacifist is about the process of doing that more than it is about the endpoint of fully being able to live totally nonviolently.

SK: Tell us more about the Gandhian Movement. What about it was anarcho-pacifist?

JL: In my research, I focused a lot on Gandhi and especially the Gandhian Movement after Gandhi died. I’m not sure how familiar people listening are with Gandhi, but a lot of research and focus on Gandhi is about Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance to the British, which is a really important part of what Gandhi did and Gandhi’s nonviolent theory.
           
The other side of Gandhi is about trying to create a nonviolent society that is non-hierarchical and local and gives as much power to communities and individuals as possible.
           
We could frame Gandhi as a kind of anarchist even though he draw on European anarchist traditions. He described the state as a soulless machine that can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. He described nonviolent societies, the purest kind of anarchy.
           
A lot of his effort went into coming up with an idea of structures which are non-hierarchical and interconnected. The people within those would engage in lots of different types of experimentation about ways of living as part of this collection program. He envisioned a society where people acted nonviolently across the board and as locally as possible.

SK: But if something is non-hierarchical, doesn’t that mean that there is no boss, there is no top person to decide what needs to be done next.

JL: From the anarcho-pacifist point of view, any kind of state structure that we currently see that is violent. At the moment, all states in the world are either defined by their monopoly on violence and their ability to use that violence against people and their authority over the people in the territory.

Gandhi and other anarchists want to break that down. When we think about not having a leader who makes decisions, I don’t think it’s about not having leadership because Gandhi was clearly a leader, but not having leaders or positions of authority permanently for privileged people who are unchangeable.
           
Leaders might rise up in certain situations and then become part of the collective again. It’s not the same as having one rigid ruler or one particular group that rules or rules for a certain amount of time, so there is a lot more fluidity.

SK: Joe, other than Gandhi, give us an example of some group or country that’s really tried to use anarcho-pacifism.

JL: That depends on how we look at it. There are groups that call themselves anarcho-pacifists. We can see that within Christian anarchist’s movements. The Tolstoy commune movement you could say was anarcho-pacifist. You could say a lot of people operating within Catholic Worker Movement and the Ploughshares Movement for example often describe themselves as anarcho-pacifists.

Beyond that, stretching more broadly into anarchism, we see it in lots of communities and groups that try to operate that is non-hierarchical and non-violent and experiment in doing that. We can see that in a lot of indigenous communities around the world. We can see that more recently with the Oaxaca Commune in Mexico. There is experimentation going on.
           
On top of that, if you look at the work of people like David Graeber, there are a lot of examples going back through history where the state wasn’t always so dominant in our society and people found ways without that kind of authority to organize on the same level as each other for the common need rather than just one group getting more resources and organization than another.

I think we’ve got an important job to do especially stepping back more into my academic role now, it’s important to highlight the places where people do operate differently, where we do look after each other, where we operate in ways that are non-hierarchical and support and embrace each other and embrace diversity.

A lot of our media and the way our government works is really focused on a particular way that we operate and puts a lot of emphasis on fear and violence. Violence obviously does exist and is out there, but we as anarcho-pacifist or a peace activist, we need to be bringing out those stories about how people do things differently on a level that people can connect to.

SK: I don’t know that much about history. There was a time for centuries where people just got along and knew things needed to get done so they did them together?

JL: I don’t know if there was a time when people always got along. I think that there is always conflict, but we can definitely find spaces in history where states and governments were not as dominating, and we can find communities and structures where there was not so much hierarchy where some people were privileged over others. Certainly not a world system where some states hold more power than others and exploit others.
           
We’re talking a lot about the rejection of violence. I think anarchists and pacifists have a positive view of humanity. I think there is this idea that when you remove top-down authority and power over the people, that people have the ability to cooperate with each other.
           
We see that in a few places. Where I am, there was an earthquake in New Zealand a few years ago and with all the chaos after the earthquake, there were only one or two people who shoplifted or used that for their own advantage. The vast majority of the stories coming out in the news were just of people who helped each other and organized things, making sure that people had food and were safe. People do that naturally without the need for a central authority to tell them to do it.
           
An anarcho-pacifist is trying to create a society that leans more on that type of organization rather than appealing to a central authority.
           
Gandhians are especially interesting in that regard because there is no feeling to appeal to the state or demand things from the state. It’s more about how they can organize to get the things that they need to get done done in a way that benefits everybody.

SK: It’s really true. We see that too in the U.S. with natural disasters where people are really kind. Their hearts really open. That’s so interesting to me; it seems like it takes something bad to happen before people can be nice to each other.

JL: Yes, sometimes I suppose. We actually see it when people are put under pressure. I think that we’ve seen that with the corona virus in various communities. People naturally tend to have each other’s backs more than they exploit each other or be violent.
           
That’s interesting because it really goes against a few hundred years of Western political theory which is based on the idea that everyone is out to get each other. Because of that, we need to give our power to a central authority to maintain control otherwise it will be chaos.
           
Anarcho-pacifist thinking, and Gandhian thinking really flips that idea on its head and says, hang on, let’s look after each other. We can look after each other and communities tend to know what is needed within that community more than someone far away in a parliament building might.

SK: Joe, it seems like a possible solution to violence is called transarmament. Explain transarmament and if it has ever been used successfully.

JL: I think that are a lot of really good arguments for transforming and removing the military, which is one of the other things I researched in the New Zealand context. A lot of the justification for military and funding for the military is that it’s about our security that we need this force to secure people.
           
I don’t think it takes too much to flip that on its head and think instead of a military force being mostly about training people to kill and to harm other people and buying and using technology to harm and kill people, using that money to train doctors and nurses rather than putting it into equipment like guns and fighter planes. We could put it into equipment that can pull people out of rubble after an earthquake or something like that. That would go a much longer way to actually creating security in society.
           
That funding could be pumped into people who are living insecurely in society because of inequality, bad housing and the cost of living. If that money was used for that it would go a lot further for creating a more secure society for people.

Suzanne Kryder talks with Dr. Nehal A. Patel, J.D., Associate Professor of
Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Michigan-Dearborn

SK: Dr. Patel, while I’m not saying that you are an anarcho-pacifist, you write about some of those similar qualities like nonviolence, corporation impact and power imbalances. You are trained as a lawyer. You also have a PhD. What is the role of the law in bringing solutions to violence or corporate corruption?

NP: Well, as a representative of the public and the only institution in society which claims this formal power to represent the public, law bodies have the potential to represent the publics’ interest in wanting to create a nonviolent society free from corruption. To what extent they do or do not fulfill this responsibility will depend in part on the extent to which wealthy, privileged parties and special interests control the implementation, interpretation and enforcement of laws.
           
At this point, as I write about in some of my own articles, I think law needs a new architecture to more adequately promote nonviolence.

SK:  A new architecture. What are three basic pieces of that architecture?

NP: In my work I talk about a few major principles. Probably the most important is what Gandhi and others in Dharmic traditions call Ahimsa which is often translated as nonviolence, non-harm or non-injury.
           
When this doctrine is a central guiding principle in a line of reasoning including in legal reasoning, then we put the concern of people’s suffering at the forefront of our considerations. That becomes a priority in the way that we think. Ahimsa is certainly one important concept.
           
A second one could be a term that Gandhi used to use called Sarvodaya. Sarvodaya often is translated as the welfare of all. The reason why this concept could be central to a nonviolent form of law is because it becomes very difficult to pit one party’s interest over another.

When thinking about what outcomes we should have in the social world, we orient ourselves to thinking about what is in the welfare of everyone. When we combine Ahimsa and Sarvodaya, we essentially have to think of ways to live together in which no one is harmed.
           
I can provide an example from one of my articles if you like.

SK: Yes, please.

NP: There was an article I wrote some years ago called “A Mindful Environmental Jurisprudence.” I looked at a case in North Michigan where a stream was being drained for the purposes of creating bottled water. The local people living there noticed that the river and its habitats were being destroyed in the process of the corporation draining the water out of the river.
           
Essentially, in that situation, the corporation argued in favor of its own property rights to take water from the river whereas the people living along the stream argued that there is a broader responsibility to the ecosystem around them.
           
If we were to use Gandhi’s concept of Sarvodaya, it would not be a question of whether the corporation has a right to take water from the steam, it would be more of a question of how can the corporation take water from the stream without harming any of the other parties that also use that stream and the habitats around the stream?
           
The idea of welfare for all has Ahimsa built into it. In this case, extracting resources from this river, how can it be done it a way that does not create harm?

SK: You coauthored a paper titled “Gandhi's Nightmare: Bhopal and the Need for a Mindful Jurisprudence.” Briefly remind us what happened in Bhopal in 1984 and then tell us why it was Gandhi’s nightmare.

NP: In 1984, there was a pesticide plant in Bhopal India, which is a city in Central India. The pesticide plant was built by an American corporation, Union Carbide Corporation. It was building methyl isocyanide, a pesticide.

One night in 1984, one of the tanks that was holding this pesticide, or this poison burst and sent a cloud of poison into Bhopal killing thousands of people in a matter of a few days. There were many other injuries, people with all kinds of health problems among the survivors.
           
When I wrote this article, I thought of the term “Gandhi’s Nightmare” because Gandhi had his own critique of the manner in which industrialization was occurring in India at the time and also worldwide. His feeling about asphyxiating gases essentially was that they were bound to pose these kinds of problems. Many of the victims were people who were poor or marginalized in some way.
           
I felt as I was reading his writings on some of the dangers of these types of phenomena that this was something he foresaw. It was almost as if when he said this that he was foreseeing the nightmare of the Bhopal and that’s what made me think of calling it “Gandhi’s Nightmare.”

SK: I’m really digging these ideas of non-harming and the welfare of all. Then I think about the corporate profit. How is that balanced by the welfare of the corporate profit?

NP: Part of what I wrote in another article called “Gandhi’s Prophesy,” which was about the idea of corporate responsibility is this idea that a business environment which is for-profit only drifts away from the idea of Sarvodaya. It drifts away from the welfare of all.

To be able to create a world in which private entities also have a sense of that welfare of all in its practices is embodied in something called Gandhi’s Theory of Trusteeship. Gandhi had an idea of trusteeship that entailed the idea that all property or in other words, all wealth that is claimed to be owned by an individual person is actually held for the benefit of society. It is very tied to the idea that the world around us is a deeply interconnected place. We are all connected, and we all influence each other. The idea of drawing a bright line between what I own and what you own can make us forget about the ways that we are all connected and the ways in which our behavior influences one another.
           
Gandhi’s Theory of Trusteeship pull us back to that recognition that we do have these impacts on each other and when we reorient ourselves to thinking about the fact that our actions, our decisions, especially in regard to resource extraction are going to have an influence on the environment and the people surrounding that area as well as people in environments far away since the Earth is a very much interconnected system of ecosystems.
           
Then we start to consider more than the simple pursuit of profit or the bottom line and how much money we’re going to make. We have to implement ways of extracting resources or ways of growing a company that integrate those considerations into our calculus.

SK: Dr. Patel, you teach at the University of Michigan Dearborn, and you’ve applied non-Western principles in classrooms. The idea is to promote empathy as a learning outcome. Tell us about some of the solutions and non-Western principles that you’ve used and how it promotes non-violence.

NP: One of the doctrines that was important to Gandhi but also has been very important in my own life is a doctrine that usually is associated with the James School of Thought, and it’s called the Doctrine of Anek?ntav?da. Anek?ntav?da can be thought of as meaning “no one way.”
           
The “An” at the beginning is like amoral or not moral or non-moral. “An” is referring to the negation of something. The next part, “ek” means one. The rest of the term refers to the idea of a path or a way. It can be translated as “no one way.” The Doctrine of Anek?ntav?da is all about the idea that there is no one way to perceive a situation.
           
One of the things that compelled me when I became a teacher was that I wanted our students to be able to walk away from class feeling that sense that there isn’t one way to perceive something. If we are both looking at an apple, we’re sitting at a table together and there is an apple in the middle of the table, it might look dark and dull to me, but it might look bright and shiny to you because maybe the sun is shining behind you and it’s illuminating that side of the apple. We don’t even experience an apple in the same way.
           
I think one of the powerful things about that doctrine is that it is constantly reminding us that if we are listening to each other, listening deeply to each other especially, we can understand why we each experience life or experience the world or experience an elephant differently. It allows us to have a gateway into being as a result, hopefully more empathetic and more compassionate to one another and that can help us to move toward a more nonviolent world.