Direct Action: Towards an Understanding of the term
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anarchist movement |
debate
Monday June 13, 2005 20:41 by Harald Beyer-Arnesen - LLR
Many are those who talk about direct actions these days, fewer try to explore its meaning, asking what kind of tool it is. This is not a semantic question but one of substance - one that lies at the core of the whole anarchist, social-revolutionary project where "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves," and the means are determined by and contained in our ends.
Direct Action:
Towards an Understanding of the term
Campaigning for wageworkers to join the Industrial Workers of the
World, Eugene V. Debs stated in December 1905: "The capitalists own
the tools they do not use, and the workers use the tools they do not
own." To this one could add: At times direct action may mean putting
the tools we do not own out of action, at times it may mean bringing
them into play for our own, self-defined needs and ends. In the final
instance, it can only mean acting as if all the tools were in fact
our own.
Direct action brought to its ultimate and logical end is the
libertarian social revolution: the working class's direct overtaking,
rearrangement, transformation and deconstruction (when not found
appropriate to human needs) of the means of production (the material
tools of freedom), and the disarmament of the forces protecting the
order that was. If we are talking about a genuine social revolution,
this can be nothing but the collective, direct action by the working
class abolishing itself as a class, and thus the state and class
society as such, making us all into citizens of a world of our own
making.
Many are those who talk about direct actions these days, fewer try
to explore its meaning, asking what kind of tool it is. This is not a
semantic question but one of substance - one that lies at the core of
the whole anarchist, social-revolutionary project where "the
emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working
classes themselves," and the means are determined by and contained in
our ends. From this perspective we can define direct action as being
an action carried out on the behalf of nobody else but ourselves,
where the means are immediately also the ends, or if not, as in a
wage strike not mediated by any union bureaucracy, the means
(decreasing the bosses' profits by our non-work, and thus also
diminishing the bosses' power) stand in an immediate relationship to
self-defined ends (increasing our wages and extending our own power).
A direct action successfully carried out brings about a direct
rearrangement of existing conditions of life through the combined
efforts of those directly affected.
Nobody need wholly agree with this definition, but I find it
logical as well as a potentially powerful instrument in developing a
practice where the future society comes to life within the shell of
the old. In all circumstances, we as anarchists and social
revolutionaries must comprehend direct action within the context of
our project of human emancipation. Direct action is however not like
pregnancy, which is something you either are or are not. Elements of
direct action may be contained in actions that do not fully qualify
as such. Part of our task consists in trying to make these elements
as dominant as possible, whenever possible. To this we need a usable
definition, something to aspire towards and measure our actions by,
and thus also acquire a greater awareness of the sources of our
strengths and shortcomings.
We will not always have the power to reach our ends through direct
action. More than any other form of action, it tends to demand a
collective, organisational force. Most clearly this will manifest
itself in the working class's direct re-expropriation of the
instruments of production and freedom. We can achieve anything
together. Building that togetherness is the difficult part, and like
a muscle not used, the force of collective action is weakened by
passivity. On a local level, where most of our actions are still
confined, or on an international level, through the co-ordinated
actions within one small sector of the working class, our ability to
carry out direct action will be restricted by it being a means not
yet generalised. We should still be able to make use of it some of
the time, but not all of the time without being crushed by the forces
we are up against. If you are fired, a sit-down strike might save
your job, but if you are the only one sitting there it might be a
good idea to look up a lawyer or some union bureaucrat. Something
which also draws our attention to how the concept of direct action
links up with another old word in the vocabulary of working class
struggles, namely practical solidarity. Solidarity does not mean
charity, and cannot be reduced to altruism. Rather it is something
that grows out of an understanding of common interests. At the root
of the IWW catchword, "an injury to one is an injury to all," lies
more than a moral economy. The words also describe a fact of social
life.
Direct action has been defined as action without intermediaries.
This is a definition in need of qualification. From an anarchist
perspective direct action is connected not only to solidarity, but
also to what tends to be a precondition for solidarity and the
underlying principle of the concept of direct democracy:
non-hierarchical human communication. Such communication lies at the
roots of what direct action always is, individual and collective
self-empowerment. As direct action contains its own end, within that
self-defined end it's meaning is also found. The more the ends are
manifested in the means, the more it is a direct action.
If we stay seated or go on playing darts as a means to prolong a
lunch break, and thus shorten our working day, then the meaning of
the action is also immediately the means used. But such collective
action has as its precondition the human dialogue. It is through the
mediation of the dialogue that the ends are defined that gives the
action its signification for us as human beings. If we stay seated or
go on with our dart playing because the boss tells us so, then even
if this will prolong our lunch break just as much or more, it is not
direct action. Now there are forms of direct action that may involve
only a single person, precisely because it is something which is of
nobody else's concern. But in general, for an action to be effective
and have more than a symbolic significance in a social context, it
must involve the participation of many. A one-(wo)man strike is at
best a political statement. Protesting the modern-day popes and tsars
If you lack water you might have to dig a well, and the act of
digging will be direct action. You may need the assistance of others
and your lack will very likely also be shared by them, making it into
a collective task. But within a class society things are rarely that
simple. The land may be owned by an absent landowner, and an
apparatus of force will exist to impose proprietor rights. Just going
out there digging the well would thus be illegal. Still, illegality
is not what defines it as direct action. Collective self-education,
for instance, is a form of direct action that often, if not always,
would be perfectly legal.
We could imagine that rather than digging the well without a
permit, we organised to sit down outside the landowner residence, the
King's Palace, the White House or the parliament building, called in
the press and proclaimed we would remain seated on the lawn
(committing the crime of trespassing) until the absent landowner, a
legislative body or somebody else with authority, granted us a permit
to dig for water on his or her property - or until we were carried or
otherwise forced away.
This surely would be civil disobedience, a breach of law, but
would it also be direct action? Hardly. We had tried to put pressure
on an authority to make or undo a judgment. In this we had abided by
their power and authority to make such a judgment in the first place.
Rather than letting our ends only be mediated by our own efforts and
(wo)man-made tools - which in this case would be spades or excavators
- we had put their rule between our means and ends. The tools yes,
the instruments of production and destruction, as well as our own
creativity: sold hours of life turned into instruments of our
exploitation. We are the ones who employ these tools, but not
according to our own plans, needs and desires. We rarely utilise them
as a means of direct action. The wage working cook does not serve the
poor as part of collective project in the time (s)he has sold to an
alien force, instead (s)he casts a vote, signs a petition, joins a
demonstration, breaks some windows or blows up a building in his or
her unwaged time. None of which produces anything immediately
digestible.
Some would define any non-parliamentary action as a direct
action, such as any street demonstration. But to make a statement
about what we would like something to be, or not to be, is not likely
to move any mountain. If the mere words, "Stop the bombing!" halted
bombs in mid-air, or took away their deadly effect, the world be a
better place to live. It is not any more likely that breaking
windowpanes would generate this effect, either.
That symbolic actions, and actions that borrow their efficiency
from the very powers we are struggling against, more and more have
come to be defined as direct actions, reflects our present
organisational impotence, our social fragmentation and a generalised
lack of trust among waged and unwaged workers in their own collective
powers. Under particular circumstances symbolic actions can be
powerful. But they should be seen as what they are at their best:
means of communication. Their degree of efficiency outside this lies
foremost in the fear among the owners of the world that they will be
followed up by more direct forms of action. At the present moment,
disorganised as we stand, or organised into passivity, they are also
often all we have, but that should not lead us to the conclusion that
they are all we could have.
Often, as during the WTO meeting in Seattle, we see proclaimed as
direct actions protests carried out in spectacular and some times
violent or destructive ways to draw the attention of mainstream
media. Though often denied, the whole logic of such actions is to
influence the powers that be by way of some imagined "public
opinion." And in the age of the world-wide web, even a demonstration
of a few dozen people can appear as a world event if only the rumour
about it is widely enough circulated, while you can live a couple of
blocks away without even noticing that it has taken place. So maybe a
better term than direct action in such circumstances might be virtual
or multi-mediated action. Ironically, both larger protests, like
those in Seattle, as well as smaller ones tend to be followed by a
critique of the mainstream media for distorting the (f)acts, for only
having reproduced their most spectacular aspects.
Of course it could be said, and not without some truth, that the
property destruction in Seattle had a symbolic value that it gained
from the particular context it functioned within. I am not arguing
against that, though this value would soon be devalued if the same
procedure were repeated over and over again. However, apart from
their symbolic value, the actions had no immediate relation to what
one wanted to achieve. The blocking of the meeting or the destruction
of property were not means to bring about any immediate changes in
the conditions of trade, exploitation and oppression: they fed no
one, did not reduce the pollution of our environment or in other ways
enrich the lives of working-class people.
Exploitation and oppression always work in concrete ways, and the
realities of what one was protesting against and the concrete points
of possible change escaped the protesters. Lacking the power to bring
about immediate changes, one appealed to the Pope and the Tsar, some
would say in less than polite ways, to use their commanding powers
over us to bring such changes about. Rather than going out digging
the wells to find the water, one demanded of the high and mighty to
order us to do so, and rather than blocking the ruling order from
polluting our water, one called on them to make laws prohibiting such
acts, or to refrain from introducing new ones allowing the pollution.
One appealed to the force of their laws, asking for better ones:
asking for an atheist Pope, a landless Tsar, a capitalism where money
wields no power. Many will find this a misrepresentation: "We
demanded the break-up of the WTO," they will say. But this, even had
it been realistic - which it was not - would at best only substitute
a not yet defined set of international laws and power relations for
the particular ones existing or in making. It was a wholly abstract
demand.
If temporarily halting the mere coming together of the delegates
of the World Trade Organisation was all one had wanted to achieve,
then the protesters used means (their own bodies) appropriate to this
end. But was this really their end? Hopefully, and far more likely,
they thought of it as a means. In the age before the telegraph and
telephone, to say nothing about more modern means of communication,
such means might also have had a more immediate effect, and a far
closer relation to the end. But today such gatherings of the high and
mighty foremost have symbolic significance. The decision-making and
co-ordination of power takes place elsewhere, and not in any
particular place at any particular date. I for one am certain that
the protesters aspired to bring about an end to particular
destructive practices associated with the policies of the World Trade
Organisation, as well as to halt even more destructive ones, and not
to the mere obstruction of the coming together of some people at a
certain place and time. Had practices of exploitation, oppression and
destruction existed only in the minds and the statements of the high
and mighty, we would not have to offer them much attention. Nor would
the high then be very mighty.
If from every community affected by the policies of the WTO (or
rather of global capitalism) there had been one person present among
the protesters in Seattle, they would be in the wrong place to bring
about changes through direct action. The con- crete and daily
manifestations of WTO policies takes place in the communities they
would have left behind, and it is also there that these policies
could be directly confronted. On the other hand, such a global
assembly could have served as an opportunity to co-ordinate actions
throughout the world, and not primarily to worry about what was going
on in the congress halls where the WTO delegates were gathered. As it
was, people from every community of the planet were not gathered in
Seattle. What is more, those who were there, to the degree they at
all considered the option of direct action, were in Seattle precisely
because of their, or rather our, impotence to bring about the
organisation needed to confront the WTO through direct action on our
home ground.
Propaganda by the deed & solidarity revisited
A critical dialogue in search of forms of action that could
directly put whatever has and will be resolved within the framework
of the WTO, IMF and World Bank wholly, or more realistically at this
stage, in part out of operation, has hardly even been attempted,
despite of, or maybe because of all claims of direct action
practices.
In this context, it is interesting that West Coast longshoremen
carried out a political strike against the WTO. However positive this
was a sign of times to come, it did not go beyond being a symbolic
action. But the event may also be considered as symbolic in another
context. The longshoremen (dockers and wharfies) and transport
workers in general, are the wageworkers with the most manifest
potency to directly and materially impose the terms of world trade.
Thus also all the efforts to destroy their strength. But these
workers would in no circumstances be able to wield such power for
long if their "propaganda by the deed" did not also bring about
manifestations of direct action by the waged and unwaged workers of
the world, or at least within significant parts of it.
The term "propaganda by the deed" brings forth associations to
bombs and other individual acts of desperation and social impotence.
But it need not refer to this. When tasks meet us on a global scale,
direct action carried out locally to bring about smaller changes in
the here and now, or internationally by a small section of the
working class, may be considered as just a drop in the bucket. But if
successfully carried out, direct actions will communicate a message
beyond their immediate ends, carrying within themselves the very
seeds of a libertarian social revolution. Acts of immediate
empowerment tend to be contagious as they practically illustrate
roads that may be travelled outside the realm of bureaucratic
intermediaries and parliamentary representation. Direct action is
always "propaganda by the deed."
This all brings us back to the question of solidarity and its
relation to direct action, and then in particular as defined as an
action carried out on behalf of nobody else. The question also arises
out of ecological concerns. Who are the directly affected, and at
what point does an act cease being direct action because it is not
being carried out by those directly affected? What interests us here
is of course the political implications of the answer given. The
advocates of ideologies of representative democracy, social democracy
and Leninism all claim to act on the behalf of "the people" in the
interest of "the people." Anarchists have always rejected not only
that the representatives of these ideologies do so, but the very
notion that they could. What is more, even if they could, we claim
that this would not be in our best interest as the value of being our
own masters is the very essence of being a human being. Something, it
must be added, which does not imply an escape from the influence and
critique of others, without which we would be nothing.
On the other hand we uphold the principles of mutual aid and
solidarity; that an injury to one is an injury to all, and thus also
the concern of all. We can skip the most absurd interpretations of
non-representation, like: "If we see a person drowning, this is not
our concern." Whether or not saving another person from drowning also
should be defined as direct action is not an interesting question.
Philosophical riddles are not the concern here, but the politics of
human emancipation.
On this level the answer to the question leads us to another: who
has the defining power? I define the low wages and bad working
conditions in company X, wherever it may be situated in the world, as
my concern not only for moral reasons, but also because, to
paraphrase Bakunin: in the hands of the owners of the world, their
exploitation and oppression becomes an instrument for my
subordination. Brought to its logical conclusion this reasoning may
however bring us straight back to rule by representation and
enlightened despotism. The defining power must be situated among the
workers of company X. However, my participation in direct action on
their initiative, or through joint initiative and co-operation, would
make me part of this direct action if my acts also otherwise
qualified as such, for instance through a blockade during a strike.
We have realized our common interests.
There is much more that could be said around this topic. But what
is crucial is to grasp its importance, so that claimed direct action
does not become a road that leads us towards elitism, and thus also
away from the anarchist project of individual and social
emancipation.
Once again we reach the conclusion that as a rule, the greater the
task the more collective the action - this to fit a libertarian
definition of direct action. We should never lose sight of the fact
that the concept of direct action emerges out of people doing
something with their own situation. It is for this reason that it has
held such a central position within the traditions of anarchism and
revolutionary syndicalism. Direct action is an expression of power
over our lives: our empowerment. Direct actions are primarily, if not
exclusively, tied to collective forms of actions also for the simple
reason that it is together that we as waged and unwaged workers have
the potency to directly, and often immediately, change our conditions
of life. The fewer the actors the more symbolic our acts as a rule
will also be. They then tend to become, not means to the immediate
transformation of part of our reality through our own efforts but,
foremost, to call on the power of others.
While many may live under the illusion that through direct action
we escape the need for organising, the opposite is true: Generally it
requires a greater degree of organised co-ordination. The degree of
our disorganisation is the degree to which our lives will be
organised by others. It is we who make the world, but we make it as a
collective (presently under the command of and through the mediation
of the owners of the world) and it is thus also together that we can
make direct profound changes unmediated by outside forces, and in the
final instance conquer the world and the power over our own
destinies.
Direct action could be seen as a kind of language: a language of
practical articulation. As such it contains also a symbolic force far
greater than any mere symbolic action, precisely because its message
is contained in and not separated from its means. Much of the reason
for our present impotence to express ourselves through direct action
lies in an ever-increasing division of labour within modern
capitalism. Not so much due to this division in itself but in our
failure to bridge it in our minds, and through organisation and
action.
We need to reconnect our means with our ends. To return to the
wage strike - it used to signify, and still often does, striking the
bosses where it hurts them the most, their banking accounts, by
withholding our capacity for labour. So why did the workers of the
"public owned" trams in Melbourne ten years ago strike by running the
trams - the tools they do not own - free of charge for the public,
while their bosses struck back by closing them down by force? The
reason is obvious. As so often is the case with public services, the
non-work of the publicly employed tram drivers would not have cost
the city council a cent. It could only save them the expenses of the
workers' wages. Free public transport, however, would cost them.
What is more crucial, this was a manifestation of workers turning
the tools they do not own into means for their own ends, as well as
for the working class community at large. What if all the waged and
unwaged workers (including school and university students) of
Melbourne had non-hierarchically organised to do the same, if only
for a day or a week? That really would have been a symbolically
powerful man- ifestation of our potency by means of direct action.
Reality is still concrete. Let's not forget it. Also in the struggle
against the policies of the World Trade Organisation, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank we should seek to find
ways to, on a local and global scale, halt and put into action the
tools we do not own for our self-defined needs.
This text originally appeared in issue 29 of the
Anarcho-Syndicalist Review www.syndicalist.org
Copied from: Zabalaza Books
www.zabalaza.net/pdfs/varpams/direct_action_hba.pdf
The author of this article Harald died last month, there are a
number of
obituries
and links to his other writings on Anarkismo.net