Contained by cops, barricades, and orange-vested marshals, demonstrations are often ritualistic displays of servility: marching in sullen procession, many demonstrators--despite marshal collaboration with cops--frighteningly chant: "This is what democracy looks like!" Still others dance naked in the streets, as many did in Calgary against the G8 Summit, hoping to disrupt traffic or create a spectacle. Rather than engendering lasting political transformation, however, these actions seem aimed at making their performers "feel better" about being oppressed--or at absolving them of their oppression of others.

In opposition to such "symbolic" forms of protest, many anti-capitalists espouse "direct action". But what do activists mean by a term that's been taken to include everything from putting a sticker on a bank machine and marching in the streets, to shutting down entire workplaces, industries, geographical spaces, or institutional processes? Taken to signify such a wide range of visible, confrontational, and collective tactics aimed at disrupting capitalism, understandings of direct action have often been excessively broad. What connection can be drawn, then, between direct action and the politics of socialism from below?

DO IT YOURSELF

Definitions of direct action that posit the oppressed, and not the state, as harbingers of social change provide a place to begin. Whatever "humane" face capitalism might gain through lobbying or elections, victories won through these means are still achieved through capitalism itself--a system based on exploitation. While government legislation may "improve" conditions for certain workers privileged by whiteness or patriarchy, these "gains" are often only secured at the cost of continued exploitation for others. The state can grant concessions. Likewise, it can take them away. Instead of letting others tinker around with the system on our behalf, direct action encourages us to "act for ourselves" so that we may confront, disrupt and potentially reorganize oppressive social relations. Obviously, any action cannot accomplish social transformation in isolation. In order to succeed, direct action must become part of a larger strategy that identifies short- and long-term political goals and encourages mass participation on a number of fronts. A tactic's effectiveness can be measured, in part, by whether or not it helps meet these goals.

For many activists, the goal of direct action is to help build mass revolutionary struggle. However, as squatters have demonstrated through housing campaigns, direct action also wins gains that can help people survive. Sometimes these gains are even won as concessions from the government. Far from relying on the state to enact broad social change to benefit the oppressed, however, direct action holds the state accountable for its violent operations. Further, direct action can win the double victory of forcing the state to provide for people's needs while demonstrating that people--through democratic self-organization--are capable of providing for themselves more effectively than the state ever could.

TRUTH IS CONCRETE

Concrete gains won through direct action give us a small taste of a better life--one that is impossible for the majority of the world’s peoples under capitalism. Furthermore, we can learn the violent lengths to which the state will go in refusing to take direction from those it claims to represent. Even if we don't immediately win our demands, we learn through practice that agents of the state have a stake in our suffering and, as such, we can’t rely on them. Whether we win or lose, direct action suggests that social revolution is necessary if we are to create a better world.

Direct action builds our knowledge of how capitalism works. Logistical planning provides an opportunity to research the concrete operations of capitalism. Industry, transportation, communications, and the management and upkeep of public spaces are all demystified through the kind of planning required to execute an effective action. Direct action is an opportunity to map out the nuts and bolts that keep capitalist society together. It is also an opportunity to begin unfastening them. Direct action also demystifies the state forces with which it brings us into contact. We learn that we can't easily disrupt and reorganize the relations of production because capital is protected by the state’s armies, prisons, police, and courts. However brutal our encounters with the state may be, these experiences can nonetheless provide us with information about the relationship between capitalism and state oppression. For example, interactions with cops and the legal system can further uncover the bourgeois, patriarchal, white supremacist and heterosexist constructions of "citizenship"--of what it means to "belong" in this society.

Whether we're denied bail because we're poor, or strip-searched without our consent because of our gender, we learn of the liberties the state will take with our "rights". When we confront it, the state is thrown into relief as an apparatus that protects capital. "Democracy", in turn, is revealed as a political process reserved for the privileged. Knowledge gained through direct action clarifies the political character of capitalism by tracing its reliance upon--and tendency to reproduce--complex systems of oppression.

DIVERSITY OF TACTICS

A movement that values a diversity of tactics is able to see how autonomy and solidarity go hand in hand. Activists can support each other in using a variety of means to achieve similar ends. Not everybody has to block an intersection. Not everyone has to write a press release. In the face of "leftist" condemnation of property damage after Seattle, the call to respect a diversity of tactics was an important strategic call for solidarity. Since then, "diversity of tactics" has, at times, masked the lack of political clarity or points of unity within an action. Unfortunately, "diversity of tactics" can inadvertently become a conservative call for an ineffective mish-mash of deeply contradictory politics and long-term goals. Used as a default, it can often preclude critical discussion about the real differences between revolutionary and reformist politics, and about what makes a tactic effective given the tasks at hand.

Despite the occasional difficulty of coordinating broad actions, direct action politics have encouraged the development of effective organizational bodies. In affinity groups, activists can attempt to prefigure the modes of political life and labour we aspire to build. By carefully choosing demands and targets, and paying attention to how direct action gets organized, activists can be attentive to interconnections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. By rotating tasks, activists can help to prevent exploitative divisions of labour that usually get drawn along lines of race and gender. Using participatory facilitation and decision-making methods can help everyone take part in discussions, especially people who are consistently silenced and marginalized. Working together on direct action can help us more intimately understand how both direct democracy and radicalized working relationships depend upon being hyper-vigilant of power relations between activists.

Through direct action, we learn to clarify our physical and emotional limits, our fears, and our vulnerabilities. In short, we demystify our own capacity to resist. Instead of trying to work beyond our capacities, which usually makes our resistance unproductive and demoralizing, we can work within our capacities and consciously try to expand them. By sharing skills and knowledge, activists can develop previously latent or exploited aptitudes. Typically, we are alienated from our labour. We do not manage it ourselves nor do we reap its direct products. Through direct action, however, we decide for ourselves how to use our labour power to make the business of alienation and exploitation difficult. Instead of reducing politics to registering our preference for the lesser of a set of evils on a ballot, doing direct action requires that we make exceedingly important and difficult collective decisions under unpredictable, spontaneous, and stressful conditions--and carry these decisions out ourselves. Direct action can raise consciousness of our power, of what we are up against, and of what we need to do next in the struggle for liberation. Labour power can, of course, be used to completely end capitalism. Through mass strikes, workers can collectively withdraw their labour from capitalist production altogether. Workers can also take over the means of production under directly democratic worker control. If direct action is understood as a self-empowering and self-determined tactic that not only disturbs but also reorganizes social relations, workers' self-management is perhaps the greatest direct action of them all.