The Deep Green Resistance Book
Strategy to Save the Planet

WITHDRAWAL

Another response to conditions of oppression is withdrawal. Withdrawal encompasses a vast range of possible actions. On one end of the spectrum are acts of personal detachment or refusal carried out by alienated individuals. Entire social enclaves—the inheritors of the Bohemian tradition—are filled with such people. Their goal is not to make broad-based social or political change, but to live “authentically.” We can see the potential problem with this strategy in some synonyms for the word “withdrawal”: abandonment, abdication, disengagement, marooning, resignation, retirement.

On the other end of the spectrum is withdrawal used as a political tactic, targeting specific economic, political, or social practices or institutions. As with legal remedies and direct action, this can be a radical—and successful—attempt to win liberty. It can also dead-end into political irrelevance and horizontal hostility. Horizontal hostility, a phrase coined by Florynce Kennedy in 1970,³⁰ describes the destruction that happens when oppressed groups fight amongst themselves instead of fighting back against the powerful. It’s a predictable behavior, and one against which we must guard. A strategy of withdrawal risks exacerbating this tendency for the obvious reason that if you close off the possibility of fighting up the pyramid of hierarchy, the only people left to fight are each other.

Figure 3-1: Horizontal Hostility

The main difference between withdrawal as a successful strategy and withdrawal as a failed strategy is whether the withdrawal is linked to political resistance or instead seen as adequate in itself. This difference often hinges exactly on the distinction between the liberal and the radical. Remember that liberalism is idealist; it conceptualizes society as made up of ideas, not material institutions. Therefore, a strategy of simply withdrawing loyalty from the dominant system, of individual psychological, intellectual, or cultural positioning, is believed by liberals to be revolutionary. While issues of identification and loyalty are crucial to building the class consciousness needed for a resistance movement, this alone is not enough. The withdrawal has got to go beyond the intellectual, the emotional, and the psychological to include a goal of actually winning justice. “Worlds within worlds” may give solace, but ultimately they change nothing. We need to guard against these impulses, as seductive as they are. The idea that all we have to do is turn our attention to ourselves and our chosen community is appealing, but such actions will never be enough. Divorced from a larger goal of liberty and a strategy of direct confrontations with power, “withdrawn” communities end up irrelevant at best, and unpleasant places toxic with personal criticisms and cultlike elements at worst.

For now, a positive example for study is the American Revolution. The colonists’ original strategy was one of withdrawal, which employed:

Local uprisings—what would now be considered mob violence—were common throughout England and across the colonies because there was no police force in the eighteenth century. Since the Middle Ages, the government depended on institutions like “hue and cry,” where lawbreakers would be apprehended by the community at large. By the eighteenth century, the preferred method was the posse commitatus, in which the magistrate or sheriff was empowered to call up as many able-bodied men as might be needed. The next line of defense was the militia. Explains historian Pauline Maier, “Both the posse and the militia drew upon local men, including many of the same persons who participated in extralegal uprisings. This meant that insurrections could naturally assume the manner of a lawful institution, as insurgents acted by habit with relative restraint and responsibility.”³¹

What it also meant was that if the population at large was sympathetic to a cause or directly involved in a disturbance, the local magistrate was left “virtually helpless.”³² This happened repeatedly throughout the period leading up to the Revolutionary War as a groundswell of people felt their rights outraged by British policies.

The Stamp Act was in many ways the beginning of organized resistance. The act was passed by Parliament in 1765 to help pay for the Seven Years’ War. Most official documents, like court records and land grants, and printed materials, like broadsheets and newspapers, had to carry a stamp, and the stamps cost money. The act was despised throughout the colonies, and colonial legislatures sent letters of protest back to England. But more important was the Stamp Act Congress. This was the first collective colony-wide effort to make common cause against Britain. Local groups opposed to the Stamp Act also created committees of correspondence, a network of activists that spanned the thirteen colonies. These committees proved crucial in providing the political infrastructure required to form the revolutionary movement that followed. According to Richard Bushman, “The network of activists meant that revolutionary language by 1773 was sounding in virtually every adult ear in Massachusetts, and that there was a fluid continuum of discourse joining the Boston press and town meeting and the talk in meetings and taverns through the Province.”³³

The Stamp Act was never enforced because of the resistance efforts of the common people. Those efforts largely took the form of property destruction and threats of bodily harm. The stamps required distributors, an official person responsible for their sale. Those officials were the leverage point, the easily identified target to stop the dreaded stamps. Street protests swelled in Boston, and then quickly spread to neighboring colonies. The distributors were hanged, burned, and/or beheaded in effigy. The mob then moved on to the distributor’s house, which would be evicted of its residents and then looted or pulled to pieces. Often the distributor would be forced to resign from the duty publicly. As a result, no one could be found who would take up the job. According to Maier, “The solution was infectious. Without distributors the Stamp Act could not go into effect, so the coercion of stampmen seemed rational, even efficient.”³⁴ The Massachusetts stamp distributor resigned on August 15th, 1765. On August 29th, Rhode Island’s followed suit, and the strategy proved so successful that the rest fell in line with alacrity. The last distributor was from Georgia, and he had to be sent from England. On reaching the US, resigning was his first and only official act. By March 1766, the Stamp Act was repealed because it was simply unenforceable.

Boycotts against British goods were strengthened into a formal agreement called the Continental Association. The Association, as it was known, wrote a fourteen-point document, the Articles of Association, which was a pact between the colonies to resist British infringement on colonial rights. Its main goal was a broad-scale boycott. To quote from the document, “a non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreement, faithfully adhered to, will prove the most speedy, effectual, and peaceable measure.” The ban on tea proved especially so.

The fascinating point is that the Association had no power of enforcement. Unlike the Crown, they could not arrest, fine, or jail offenders. Offenders could only be named and shamed in print and socially ostracized as “the enemies of American liberty.” According to Walter H. Conser, et al.,

The Association tried to address the economic hardship that the colonies were sure to endure because of the boycott. Toward that end, they sought to “encourage frugality, economy, and industry, and promote agriculture, arts and the manufactures of this country, especially that of wool.” Some provincial conventions thought through the economic implications and tried to encourage the manufacture of the following: “woolens, cottons, flannel, blankets, rugs, hosiery, coarse cloths, all sorts of dyes, flax, hemp, salt, saltpeter, gunpowder, nails, wire, steel, paper, glass, copper products, and malt liquors.” Massachusetts added “tin plates, firearms, and buttons.”³⁶ Conser, et al., explain that

Patriots also refused to quarter troops, published newspapers without the required stamps, and continued to run government bodies that the British declared dissolved.

The situation escalated in Massachusetts. With the Massachusetts Government Act, Parliament essentially wrested control of both governing bodies and the judiciary from the citizens. The first provision declared that judges were to be appointed by the governor, himself appointed by the Crown, instead of by the council, which had been under the control of the people. This was to take effect August 1, 1774. What happened instead has been called the first American Revolution.³⁸

The patriots of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the seat of Berkshire County, “proposed a new and more direct method for opposing British policy: Why not close down the courts? Since the weight of governmental authority was experienced most directly and frequently through the judicial system, closing the courts would effectively bring the Massachusetts Government Act to a halt.”³⁹ The Pittsfield Committee of Correspondence circulated the strategy. Boston soon replied, “We acknowledge ourselves deeply indebted to your wisdom.… Nothing in our opinion could be better concerted than the measures come into by your County to prevent the Court’s sitting.”⁴⁰

The Berkshire County Court never opened again until the United States was an independent nation. On August 16, 1,500 unarmed patriots—farmers, artisans, small business owners—took over the courthouse. As one witness described it, “The Sheriff commanded them to make way for the court; but they gave him to understand that they knew no court or any other establishment than the ancient laws and usages of their country, & to none other would they submit or give way on any terms.”⁴¹ The scene was repeated throughout the state. Anyone who had agreed to officiate as judge or magistrate was liable to face social shunning and intimidation at church, at home, and on the street by crowds that reached into the thousands, until they resigned, often in public and in print. Most of these encounters were restrained and even respectful. According to historian Ray Raphael,

Indeed, the crowds were so orderly some of them voted on whether to raise a cheer on the Sabbath. Wrote observer Abigail Adams, “It being Sunday evening it passed in the negative.”⁴³

Their strategy of withdrawal—economic, political, and identificational—created a true culture of resistance that successfully supported acts of further resistance. Writes Raphael, “While a group of renowned lawyers, merchants, and slave-owning planters were meeting as a Continental Congress in Philadelphia to consider whether or not they should challenge British rule, the plain farmers and artisans of Massachusetts, guarding their liberties jealously and voting at every turn, wrested control from the most powerful empire on earth.”⁴⁴ By the time the shot heard ‘round the world was fired, the Crown had already lost control of the colony. The Red Coats’ march to Lexington was a last-ditch effort to gain control of the weapons.