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BAYARD RUSTIN
article, Lynd takes pains to distinguish between violent and nonviolent
revolution. But I would submit that the problems raised by some of
the current thinking in pacifist and New Left circles can best be dealt
with in terms of Nonviolence and Democracy.
Militant civil rights activists have in recent times become con·
scious that seeds of elitism are embedded in forms of nonviolent direct
action (depending, as they do, on courage, experience, willingnes.!
to endure suffering and other personal qualities more likely to be found
in the dedicated few than the sympathetic many). They have recog–
nized that this danger can be balanced or diminished only to the extent
that mass action-involving large numbers of people performing a
variety of
tasks
requiring various talents at varying levels of intensity
-is encouraged and brought into existence. This recognition is largely
responsible for the "Movement's" increased emphasis on economic
problems and political action.
The issue which now confronts us, and which Lynd has helped
to crystallize, is: what are the structural or procedural arrangements
by which the will of the rank and file is expressed; and what is the
relationship between the rank and file and the leadership? Does rank
and file decision-making power result merely from voluntary rejec–
tions of power by the leadership, by gestures of anonymity or abdica–
tion?-in which case the effective participation of the masses hinges
on the whims or personality traits of the leaders. Or is that power
guaranteed a priori by those structures, procedures and devices which,
however modified to meet specific circumstances, generally go by the
name of "representative democracy."
We need to be discussing the precise nature of these guarantees–
which ones are essential and indispensable to a definition of democracy
and which are merely historical or accidental to a particular era,
culture or system. Inescapably such a discussion must,
if
it is not to
become scholastic, strike contrasts among existing social systems and
the ideologies that justify them. It is precisely
this
kind of discussion
which creates among too many new radicals a nervous irritation erupt–
ing in the charge of "red-baiting."
I am trying to suggest that there is a problem of elitism on the
New Left, that it is manifest in its internal life as well as
in
its
conceptions about society at large, and that the internal and external
aspects of the problem are connected. The problem cannot be dermed
