Direct Action

A political method in which persons, without the use of power holders, representatives, professionals, or indirect institutional means, engage practically in social life and realize stated goals. With direct action you realize the intention of the action directly without asking for permission. Direct action might be secret or public, nonviolent or violent, legal or illegal, as well as against or for something. In its most unique variation it transforms the goal into its means. For example, if you want free speech in a dictatorship, you practice free speech and ignore the rules, mind-set, and culture of censorship by publicly making your opposition known—as Charta 77 and other freedom groups did under dictatorship in Eastern Europe before 1989. Or a movement, such as the Plowshares, which wishes for disarmament of nuclear weapons but live in the United States, the most nuclear armed country in the world, put into practice their own disarmament actions at military factories and bases. With hammers, bolt cutters, and other household tools they disarm (or “destroy”) weapons equipment and thus enact the biblical prophecy of beating their swords into plowshares.

Thus, direct action attempts to achieve the aspired change through autonomous means, bypassing power holders. It is a kind of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture of politics in which you make wished-for changes yourself. Direct action is the direct intervention into something in society according to activists' own values, ideas, or needs, where perceived problems are directly redeemed or possibilities realized. A popular slogan among direct actionists is “If not now, when? If not you, who?”

Its opposite is indirect action;that is, conventional representative politics. It would be indirect to ask leaders, authorities, parents, experts, corporations, or civil servants to solve a problem for you. Direct action varies and might be practical work to create fair trade, ecological villages, direct democracy, cooperatives, or to make your own clothes. It might also be a matter of dramatic actions that confront power structures and state laws.

This tradition was developed in labor struggles and by anarchism since the 19th century (e.g., in Russia and Spain), 20th-century nonviolent movements (e.g., in India), and the anti-authoritarian movements of 1960s (e.g., the situationists in France). The concept is popular today within various radical movements (e.g., militant environmentalists in the United States, Australia, and Norway).

Both academic and activist literature often mistakenly equates the concept with civil disobedience, protest, or demonstration. Some even understand it as necessarily violent and secret. Such confusion increases by the frequent reference to, for example, anarchist assassinations of ruling elites in 19th-century Russia as a propaganda of the deed. Still, the U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., used the concept regularly but preferred to add the word nonviolent. Nonviolent direct action is a common term today within various movements in the United States and United Kingdom, often simply as NVDA. An illegal and secret (and sometimes violence-prepared) direct action tradition is cultivated in diverse groups but similar DIY cultures, like the Animal Liberation Front in England, the Autonomen in Germany, and the Black Bloc in the United States.

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