The World Task of Pacifism

by A. J. Muste

Overview

It is a common thing to hear people of practically all schools of thought say that what is going on today is not a war in the ordinary sense of the term but a revolution. One of the leaders of the younger generation of pacifists said to me recently that for the most part our pacifist movement is not aware how profound and sweeping are the changes that are coming and that, as a consequence, we pacifists are still approaching our tasks with a narrow and provincial vision and on a petty scale.

On the other hand, Gerald Heard has said that the pacifist movement alone can qualify as the "receiver" for the bankrupt western world, which faces extinction unless pacifists are prepared to "take over" presently. I believe this to be a sober statement of fact. I shall try to explain why and how it is so.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940157056049
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	01/07/2016
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #13
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	114 KB

About the Author

Abraham Johannes Muste, born on January 8, 1885, died on February 11, 1967. Born in Holland, he was brought to the U.S. as a child of six and raised by a Republican family in the strict Calvinist traditions of the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1909, he was ordained a minister in that church, and married Anna Huizenga, with whom he was to share the next 40 years and raise three children.

In the 1912 presidential election he cast his vote for Eugene Victor Debs. In 1914, increasingly uncomfortable with the Reformed Church, he became pastor of a Congregational Church. When war broke out in Europe, A.J. became a pacifist, inspired by the Christian mysticism of the Quakers. Three years later, these beliefs cost him his church. He then started working with the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union in Boston, and took a post with the Friends in Providence. In 1919, when the textile industry strikers appealed for help from the religious community, he suddenly found himself thrust into the center of the great labor strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In the early 1920s, A.J. became director of the Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. This school was of enormous importance in labor history; its curriculum consisted of the theory and practice of labor militancy.

For several years during the 1920s he served as Chairman of the religious pacifist organization, Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) but steadily drifted toward revolutionary politics, and in 1929 he helped form the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), seeking to reform the AF of I from within. When the Depression broke like a storm over America, the CPLA became openly revolutionary and was instrumental in forming the American Workers Party in 1933—a “democratically organized revolutionary party” in which A.J. played the leading role. In 1940, he became Executive Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a post he held until 1953.

There are two themes that ran through A.J. Muste’s life so clearly and marked his own actions so decisively, that the conflict between them became a dialectic, never resolved. One theme was peace, nonviolence, profound reverence for life. The other theme was social justice. To respect life meant to struggle to achieve social justice, yet the struggle for social justice invariably disturbed the peace and risked the nonviolence so central to A.J. The life-destroying institutions of injustice that A.J. saw around him were intolerable