Movement for a New Society

The Movement for a New Society (MNS) was a U.S.-based network of social activist collectives, committed to the principles of nonviolence, who played a key role in social movements of the 1970s and 80s.

According to a description from the MNS publication, Building Social Change Communities (1979),

The precursor to the MNS was A Quaker Action Group (AQAG), founded by Lawrence Scott in 1966. Dissatisfied with the response of the mainstream Quaker church to the United States involvement in the Vietnam War, Scott founded AQAG with the intention of sparking a renewed commitment to the Quaker Peace Testimony.

Frustrated by their failure to achieve this end, AQAG members including Scott and Quaker George Willoughby, refashioned the group as the Movement for A New Society in 1971. Other founding members included Bill Moyer, George Lakey and Lillian Willoughby.

The members of MNS consciously sought to develop tools and strategies that could be employed to bring about revolutionary change through nonviolent means. The three-part focus of MNS included training for activists, nonviolent direct action and community. The main location for MNS activity was in West Philadelphia. Other locations included Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle, Tucson, Western Massachusetts, and more.

During the 1970s and early 1980s Philadelphia was the base for weekend, two-week and nine-month programs that trained US and international activists in direct action organizing, group process, consensus decision-making, liberation/oppression issues and more. Activist training also happened in other locations and through traveling trainers programs.

MNS did not focus its energies exclusively on one issue or injustice. Its members were involved in working for social change on many fronts, most notably in the movement to end US involvement in the Vietnam war, and during the citizen-led opposition to the expansion of the US nuclear industry in the mid to late ‘70s. MNS members were also active in the anti-nuclear weapons movement, the Pledge of Resistance (anti-US intervention in Central America), feminism, GLBTQ, community organizing, and food/worker cooperatives.

MNS was unusual in combining feminist group process, broad analysis of interrelated people's struggles including class and culture, and personal empowerment techniques ranging from music and street theater as political organizing tools to Re-Evaluation Counseling. With their group process skills, MNS members often played roles of facilitating meetings and training peacekeepers for large protests. Several MNS techniques, including small-to-large-group consensus decision making, an action structure based on affinity groups, and the idea that proper training was key to successful actions, were widely adopted by several social change movements, starting with the Clamshell Alliance occupation of the Seabrook nuclear power plant construction site, continuing through the network of affinity-group-based alliances that took direct action for safe energy nationwide and worldwide, and also influencing later movements such as the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and the Occupy movement of 2011-2012. Gene Sharp, a theoretician of nonviolence with ties to MNS, was a major influence in social justice movements around the world, including the nonviolent liberation of South Africa and the Arab Spring.

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