Interview: George Lakey - Peace, justice and conflict
George Lakey, a leading American Quaker activist, spoke with Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, about the connections between his faith and campaigning, his views on nonviolent direct action and his recent concerns
Would it be fair to say, George, that your commitment to nonviolence and your faith grew together? Very much. It was a mercy to discover the seventeenth-century Quakers, who were cousins of the Levellers and the Diggers and so on. They were part of that whole revolutionary ferment that was going on at the time of the [English] Civil War. George Fox was, in fact, a warrior. He was enormously attractive to soldiers. Whenever George Fox would show up at a market square, soldiers would start accumulating. He got along with them. They got along with him. He was even offered the captaincy of a Cromwell unit because he was so obviously an excellent warrior. He was a nonviolent warrior.
I learned about early Quakers and their nonviolent revolutionary posture, how they made war on the one per cent in Britain, how they believed in pre-figurative politics. They set up their alternative institution called the Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania.
There was a tremendous lot of inspiration from them. The point is that early Quakers enabled me to fully identify with the Society of Friends because they brought nonviolent revolution to such a fine point and did it with an obvious spiritual undergirding.
What is your background?
I was brought up in a blue-collar family, working class, in rural Pennsylvania, so my parents did not graduate from high Doctorschool. They were each forced out of high school in order to work to enable the family to survive. Very hard times. There was never very much money around.
I gained so enormously from that background. I don’t know of an organisation that doesn’t benefit from more working class people in it; except organisations like unions, which only have working class people in them, because they then benefit from having middle class people in them.
One of the advantages of my having been brought up in the working class and then moving into the middle class, which is what I’ve done, is that I have been able to acquire some of the skills of middle class-ness at the same time. And I appreciate that because both classes have so much to bring to the table.
I was brought up a non-pacifist. I didn’t discover Quakerism until I went to college. And it was there that I was hugely attracted by the worship process. I’ve always been a deeply religious person. I was a very intensely religious boy and I love the worship of the Quakers, their style.
At the same time, I was initially repelled by the pacifism. I thought ‘this is craziness’. We obviously have to be violent, when push comes to shove. So it took a lot of soul-searching, and a lot of research, in order to come to the point where I could adopt pacifism. But I never did adopt the harmony kind of pacifism as, obviously, I adopted the conflict-oriented kind of pacifism. (laughs)
Your activism, recently, has been pretty climate-focused. Would you like to say something about that?
It seemed important to me that the Quaker banner be raised high with regard to that issue. One thing about the Quaker ‘brand’ in the US is there’s still a lot of esteem for the Quakers in the US. So, we felt, well, by waving the Quaker banner in the context of this movement, it would be something that would be useful in supporting people that are being targeted by the right wing and so on – there might be some usefulness in that way. So we decided to start a group called ‘Earth-Quaker Action Team’ in order to be able to hoist that banner aloft.
Then the question was what we should focus on first. We were looking around for an issue that was winnable – where it might make a difference to add our small force – and we found that mountain top removal coal mining has already been targeted for years by the people of Appalachia, who are most severely impacted with high cancer rates and so on, but also by people around the country, knowledgeable people, that have been joining that struggle.
We thought, OK, this is a struggle that probably can be won, let’s add our small voice to that. Let’s of course use nonviolent direct action, because that’s the most effective and strongest way to operate in a situation when you’re up against the real nasties, so let’s see what we can do – and that’s what we’ve been doing.
We’ve just finished two years and a bit. Quakers used to be, maybe thirty or forty years ago, very prominent in nonviolent direct action in the US. Bayard Rustin was a key advisor to Martin Luther King. He coached King in the early days when King wasn’t very clear what to do. Bayard was a Quaker. I was a young guy then and I got to be mentored by some people who knew a tremendous lot about nonviolent direct action.
Most of those people have passed on, and the strategic ‘smarts’ about nonviolent direct action campaigning and maybe some of the courage has been lost in the meantime within the Quaker community. Our plan was to create a new Quaker force to enter this. We realised that we had to have a learning curve here. We couldn’t just haul together the good old folks – because they’re dead mostly – so we needed to start over: building skills, building the strategic sparks and building the courage.
So we’ve been doing exactly that, and it’s been a thrilling experience for me to watch people who I’ve known for years to be deeply committed to the electoral process and ‘well, let’s lobby’ and ‘speaking truth to power would be a good thing’, and ‘witness is the way to go’, and all of that kind of thing that has taken over Quaker culture in the US, allowing those dampers to move aside and create fresh space for creativity and courage to manifest.
It’s been very much an empowerment process for me to watch and nurture, and we’re getting pretty feisty, we’re getting to be an outfit that the fifth largest bank in the US has to seriously worry about. Allies are critical. Any group of protesters who think they can do anything by themselves are out of touch with reality.
Our attack on the banks is not only because so many Americans are now distrustful of banks, thanks to 2008, but also because banks are key in this preferred way of mining by the evil mining companies. So our job is to choke off the capital – and already Morgan Chase was chased out of funding mountain top removal – not by us but by other forces and we’re intending to chase PNC Bank out of the business as well. It’s wonderful fun. Twisting their tail. We love doing it. I’m practising now for a 200-mile walk from eastern Pennsylvania to western Pennsylvania – because their headquarters are in western Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh, and we’re intending to walk across the state – and do something, yet to be announced, at the corporate headquarters, and they will know every day that we’re on the road and that we’re coming to get them.
Most folk I’ve met would say – if you are trying to topple powerful forces, which are bound to fight you violently, then you’re going to have to, at some point, use violence to overcome that violence.
Our database includes dozens of cases of dictatorships being overthrown nonviolently. It’s simply factually false to assert that what has been done so frequently cannot be done!
Could you expand on the difference you have highlighted between nonviolent revolution and what you call ‘middle class pacifism’?
Middle class pacifism has a very strong interest in the common ground, in reconciliation. For example, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, it’s built into the title. ‘Let’s find a way to come together’, that’s very strongly the concern. At a low point in the Quaker tradition, with what is still called the Peace Testimony, there was a proposal from one of our most outstanding Quakers that it be called the ‘Testimony of Harmony’, a ‘Testimony for Harmony’. So middle class people, not for any nasty reasons, but just because it’s the job of middle class people… We have to take a step back, I guess, and note what are the functions of these different classes.
The function of the middle class is to manage, and nurture, the working class on behalf of the owning class. So, it is bred into middle class people from when they are little bitty people that management is key. Of course, all kinds of enterprises do need management, right. But in patriarchal and capitalist history that’s what we have got. It’s the middle class’s job to manage in that way.
So, do you know any managers who have moved ahead in their careers because the people they are managing are constantly conflicting? No.
The sign of a good manager is conflict resolution. The sign of a good manager is to have people working cooperatively together in a harmonious way. And the more harmonious, say, a bunch of school teachers are, the more we appreciate the principle of people really being in harmony.
So, that is hugely a value in the middle class – harmony and common ground. The thing is: ‘only harmony’ is really insanity. ‘Only harmony’ is death. There also needs to be conflict. The nonviolent revolutionary tradition is one in which the emphasis is not on harmony, it’s on conflict.
Polarisation is the meat and drink (or, for vegans, the tofu) of life. We have to have polarisation. Martin Luther King was in that tradition. When he got the Nobel Peace Prize, there were a lot of people criticising because they said: ‘Wait a minute, we had harmony in our town and then Martin Luther King came to town, and there was all that conflict, and there was blood on the streets. And the guy gets a Peace Prize for that?’
Is peace about harmony or is peace about conflict?
King said peace is about conflict – because peace is a concept that includes justice. And you can’t have justice without conflict. You have to struggle, you have to polarise the situation in order to get something done. So that is a very major distinction.
There have been people who have been able to do both. In a conflict-ridden pacifist organisation, I love to have the skills to enable them sometimes, to be able to agree enough, to move the organisation forward. And that’s usually not done through polarisation. It’s done through other skills.
On the other hand, an organisation that says ‘We’re getting along fine, we’re just not getting anything done,’ well, then of course my job is to assist polarising to happen in that organisation. I was part of a facilitation team leading a recent weekend retreat of a whole coalition working on mountain top removal coal mining. It was a weekend. By Saturday night, they were in tremendous battle with each other. And some of the leaders were saying: ‘George, we want to fire you. Even though the retreat isn’t over, we want to fire you. Because we were getting along, and now we at hammer and tongs with each other.’ And I said, with my facilitation team, ‘You are on target. You are doing great. You are fighting, you are crying, you are screaming at each other. Excellent work. Congratulations.’
And, of course, the organisation has moved ahead as a result of that stormy weekend. I believe that the world needs both more conflict and more harmony – at the same time. Certainly in my country we need way, way, way more conflict than we have going. And the little I know about your country, it needs way more conflict than it’s got going.
But there is time for this and a time for that. That’s Biblical. (laughs)
An extended version of Milan Rai’s interview with George Lakey was published in the 2544, 2545 and 2547-8 editions of Peace News. George Lakey will be visiting Britain in July. For further information visit: http://bit.ly/LakeyUKTour
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