Direct Action Gets The Goods

national | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis

Friday December 16, 2005 17:18

by Emily Henry - Organise!

organiseireland at yahoo dot ie

From the black block havin’ a go, to the clown army tickling cops and putting flowers in their hair, from marches to smashing McDonalds, gluing locks to throwing bricks and even it seems going to rock concerts– all of these activities have had the term direct action applied to them incorrectly.

Direct action is being confused with actions that are probably best regarded as symbolic and more often than not ineffective. A lot of the confusion is down to media reports of anything they regard as outside the parameters of acceptable protest as direct action, but a significant amount of it is down to the desire on the part of many activists to do ‘direct action’. This leads to claims by those involved that actions, such as the recent Making Poverty History event on Derry’s walls, are ‘direct action’ – such events may sometimes be worthy and may raise awareness but direct action they certainly aren’t. Many activists regard summit protests, such as those held in Gleneagles against the G8 meeting, as direct action – but such protests, even if they are successful in shutting down a summit remain as symbolic as the summits they are protesting [see Class Struggle Versus Summit Protests pg. 8].

Direct action has also become a by-word for violence, to the extent that much of the anti-war and anti-globalisation movement talk specifically of NVDA – Non Violent Direct Action. That’s not to say people engaged in direct action shouldn’t defend themselves or that violence is never acceptable, simply that this view of direct action is partial and misrepresentative.

So what is direct action? Put simply it:

…refers to action undertaken directly between two individuals or groups, without the interference of a third party. Specifically to Anarcho-Syndicalists (and other libertarian communists) this means:
The rejection of participation in parliamentary or statist politics and the adoption of tactics and strategies which place responsibility for action firmly in the hands of the workers themselves. (Anarcho-Syndicalist FAQ, http://anarchosyndicalism.net/faq/1d.htm#1d2)

Cliched though it may sound direct action really is about empowering ourselves and breaking the dependency on others to do things for us.
Rather than pleading, through official intermediaries, with our bosses or electing politicians to sort it:

Fundamental to direct action is the reality that we can only rely on ourselves to achieve our goals (SolFed, About Solidarity Federation).

Direct Action in Our Workplaces

Direct action can be applied in as many different areas as there are forms of direct action. Of course for libertarian communists the main areas of application are in our workplaces and communities. In their leaflet A Workers Guide to Direct Action the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sets out what they mean by direct action in a workplace context:

Direct action is any form of guerrilla warfare that cripples the bosses ability to make a profit and makes him/her cave into the workers demands. The best known form of direct action is the strike, in which workers simply walk off their jobs and refuse to produce profits for the boss until they get what they want.

Strike action is at times more limited than this implies, particularly given the constraints of Trade Union bureaucracies, the impact and fear of anti-union legislation and a prevalent ideology of social partnership.
Wildcat strikes, “unofficial” strikes, where this stranglehold is removed have become increasingly used by workers in recent years and such action certainly returns some of the impact to the strike weapon.

In June up to 300 postal workers took immediate wildcat action due to the suspension of 30 of their fellow workers. The action took place at the Tomb Street sorting depot following workers refusal to accept un-agreed working practices, and the action taken ensured the dispute was resolved within two days. Compare that to the debilitating and drawn out process that accompanies the balloting process for official industrial action and there can be little doubt that a short sharp shock is often a better option.

However if a wildcat drags on large amounts of financial solidarity are needed to support the strikers, even in the case of official action the bosses ability to sit out a strike for longer than many of us could survive of strike pay (if our ‘leadership’, who are still after all drawing their fat salaries from our membership dues, deign to provide us with any) means that other methods of direct action may be more appropriate and effective.

In my own experience, several years ago as a result of mounting grievances, fellow railway workers decided to inform the company that they were unavailable to work an upcoming bank holiday. Management panicked – one manager was sent by car towards Bangor getting out along the way in order to board a train worked by one of the workers’ shop stewards. Faced with the prospect of having next to no trains running and with no time to do anything about it a meeting between workers representatives and management was set up immediately. The upshot of this was the addressing of many of the workers grievances and a small but significant improvement in working conditions. And no one lost out on overtime for working the bank holiday either, due to the swift resolution of the dispute. In this case it was enough to threaten wildcat action in order to get results.

There are other methods of direct action available in the workplace, Rudolf Rocker, a German Anarcho-Syndicalist wrote in his book Anarcho-Syndicalism in 1938:

By direct action the Anarcho-Syndicalists mean every method of immediate warfare by the workers against their economic and political oppressors. Among these the outstanding are the strike, in all its graduations from the simple wage struggle to the general strike; the boycott; sabotage in its countless forms; anti-militarist propaganda; and in particularly critical cases… armed resistance of the people for the protection of life and liberty1.

Direct action is about workers acting to defend or improve their conditions using work to rules, strikes and occupations rather than trusting the Labour Relations Agency or Industrial Tribunals to sort things out for them.

Direct Action Against the War

Before the war on Iraq millions of people marched in opposition on February 15th 2003, including around 15,000 in Belfast and 100,000 in Dublin, but they were ignored by politicians.
Direct action is harder for them to ignore, and while workers and anti-war activists were unable to carry out much in the way of it there were nevertheless some small but significant examples of direct action that give us a glimpse of the potential and strength of it as a method of resistance. In particular the action taken by grassroots activists and anarchists at Shannon airport forced three of the four commercial airlines that had been transporting Gulf bound US troops to pull out. Action ranged from breaches of the perimeter fence to physical attacks on US planes. This had an impact and provided a glimpse of what could be achieved but one of the problems was the lack of interaction with workers at Shannon. One of the forerunners of Organise!, the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation did attempt to build bridges and a bulletin aimed at the workers was distributed during one of the protests, but this was isolated and unsustainable for such a small group with no local base.

More potential had been glimpsed on the 7th of January 2003 when two train drivers blacked a train carrying ammunition to Glen Douglas on Scotland’s west coast. The ammunition was believed to have been destined for the war on Iraq – in the end it had to be transported by road.

Direct Action in Our Communities

In communities in the south direct action has meant organising to defeat the water charge and fighting the bin tax. Socialist Party TD Joe O’Higgins may have got elected on the back of the anti-water charges campaign but it was not his election that defeated the Irish government.
Mass opposition and direct action defeated the charge and anti-water charges campaigners in the north should learn valuable lessons from this victory of working class people.

Civil disobedience and mass non-payment also toppled Thatcher and defeated the Poll Tax in Britain.

Direct Action in Spain

In 2003 striking CNT (the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Union) members took on Ferrovial Servicos, a street cleaning and bin collecting company, due to breaching of agreements made following action taken the previous year. After 134 days of struggle, protest and mounting pressure on the company – which saw 6 workers going on hunger strike, the use of scab labour by the company, daily demonstrations, a noisy wake-up call every morning outside the City Council and a blockade every afternoon, picketing at the company gates, weekly protest marches to Seville and performances of the Full Monty by striking workers – the dispute ended in victory for the workers.

A Rejection of Powerlessness

Direct action is a rejection of the notion that working class people are powerless. Improvements to our lives are not handed down benevolently from above – they must be fought for. For libertarian communists direct action is more than an effective means of defence or even of going on the offensive and changing something for the better, it is, for the working class:

A continuous schooling for their powers of resistance, showing them every day that every least right has to be won by unceasing struggle against the system (Rudolf Rocker).

Direct action is an essential preparation for the free socialist society that we are striving to create. Through engaging in direct action, even when we make mistakes, we have the opportunity to learn from experience that there is no need to leave things to ‘experts’ or professional politicians. We should have learnt by now that that course offers us nothing but disempowerment, betrayal and broken promises and results in a pervading sense of powerlessness. And yet we are far from powerless. Direct action teaches us to control our own struggles, while building a culture of resistance that links with other workers in struggle. Solidarity and mutual aid find real expression and as our confidence grows so to does our ability to change the world.
Direct action, like they say, gets the goods.

J. Brannigan

1 Rockers example of armed resistance in ‘particularly critical cases’ was written in reference to the revolutionary struggle against Fascism that had been ongoing in Spain since 1936.

From the pages of Working Class Resistance, 24 page magazine of Organise!, now available at our website

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Comments (6 of 6)

It's time for a re-evolution.

by Seán Ryan

Sat Dec 17, 2005 04:24

An interesting article, and one that is on a subject that has made me ponder for many years.

I think it is fair to say, that I agree with most of the philosophy expressed.

However, I believe the "movement" falls into the very trap it sets out to remove. This is to say that anarchist philosophy, to me at least, is solely about empowerment and more importantly, self-empowerment. Waiting for, or forming, a group to achieve this end is in many respects an exercise in defeat. Don't get me wrong, I understand that society is a contract, between individuals, and that it is based on self evident truths. I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that the right to discern a self evident truth rests with the individual alone and that consequently, the individual alone must under his own authority, undertake to fix any injury he perceives to his society. Before someone "spits out the dummy," allow me to say that I'm not promoting some sociopath's right to take life, I'm promoting the belief that I have, that basically, morality is self evident to more people than it is not self evident to.

I suppose I'd better explain a bit more, considering that I've just questioned the rights of movements and their effectiveness.

The first part is easy. Movements have a right to exist simply because each member has the right to want to form a movement. That's not really an issue.

My main criticism about movements relates to their efficiency and effectiveness.

Today's world is without a doubt set up, to cater to capitalism and its current offshoot, inverted democracy, where it's power from the people as opposed to power to the people. It was set up over a large time span, and has rendered traditional tactics and movements largely helpless.

The proof of this is very similar to the Ontological proof of God, and I apologise for that. But I think that finally this proof has found a home that doesn't reject it. The world is the way that it is, because our tactics over the course of time have become antiquities and if they don't change, we have failed, and because capitalism has stolen the traditional anarchist tactical arsenal, and put it to its own use, to further our defeat. Eg, advertising is propaganda. IBEC is a union of "boss men," who have amazing pull with the government. Captialism is very familar with our philosophy and methodologies, it is only by embracing techniques that capitalism cannot embrace and techniques that do not show themselves to be self evidently immoral to the majority, can capitalism be unmasked and defeated.

In a similar sense, so has the language used to define the philosophy, become antiquated. It seems to me, that always referring to "working class" etc. is to recognise that it exists. It is by ignoring imaginary boundries that we shatter them. To embrace the boundry is to turn one's back on one's equals.

Everybody is an anarchist. If you choose to disobey the will of the state you are an anarchist. If you choose to be a slave of the state you are an anarchist. The question should not be about identifying anarchists but questions about who is in denial. This said, now that it is established that everybody is an anarchist, its ok to be antisocial every now and then, simply because the anarchist is the builder of society, and antisocial behaviour or dissent shapes this, and this shaping occurs in a more primordial sense and occurs more smoothly and naturally than the actions of any pseudo-anarchist or group mind ever could. Afterall the group mind is an averaging action and its result will reflect no individual's opinion within the group. And it is harder to argue and fight a cause that is not in its totality, one's own. Any contrary argument must by nature follow a conformist nature.

Let me give an example in efficiency and time management.

A thousand protestors march up and down outside their place of employment.

These people are already contained, no resources are used to achieve this. This is inefficient. Disruption is minimal in that it only effects a very small percentage of society, this makes it easy for the lap dog of the state RTE, etc. to marginalise and "spin" the protest.

Now imagine a thousand protestors who decide to shut down every financial institution in Dublin and or elsewhere for a day or two. And doing it in a very legal fashion. For example, protestor no.1 walks up to a cashier's spot in a bank. After engaging the official in as lengthy a transaction as possible, protestor no.1 eventually moves on to the hatch where one opens a new account. After engaging in as long a transaction as possible, protestor no.1 walks back to the cashier and closes the the account again in a fashion that wastes and steals more time. Now get the other 999 protestors to agree to do similar protests but to choose random targets and methods and you get my point. Who's time is wasted now? And think of the complexity in the demographics of the state controlling or quieting it.

It's time to address that age old fallacy. The one where time is equated with money. I note, that this equating only occurs after wage rates are set. Anyways if anything that's has been learnt from the Bush regime, it's that you go for the money. The more of it that you disrupt the closer you get to freedom. Couple this with the fact that these 1000 people are still absent from work and thus the effect from the direct action on their employer remains the same, however now the employee has hindered another cog of the capitalist machine and will cause it to falter also, adding I may add, to the pressure on the employer and the state itself.

Capitalism has evolved and has done so in a way that defeats anything that has tried to stop it.

It is time for individual to do that which they first formed society for to begin with. The individual must grow and take upon himself the mantle of responsibility and rightness, and proceed in his own cause, all to the better if he co-operates with like minded individuals, nonetheless, we live in a world of wonder, to respect and appreciate this fact it behoves man, to realise that it is man singular who influences society's growth and not the conformity promised by the acceptance of a group mind opinion.

It think the recent schisms within the anarchist philosophy, over the last century, go some way in regard to this idea that I have, that anarchy needs to evolve. I believe that currently it is diversity and diversity alone that stops capitalism from dealing a death blow to the anarchist movement. For this evolution to continue, the schisms must become more diverse and associations develeop out of sheer need for efficiency and effectiveness of the strategy rather than the need to group huddle or proclaim the superiority of a thought just because the group said so.

I guess my underlying argument can be broken down to an argument of semantics. And it simplifies down to a simple question.

Have I been enslaved by the state and is it this fact that justifies my protest, or, is it that I see the state operating towards my enslavement, and my right to response is derived from my right to choose to see my self under threat?

I myself take the latter road and I admit it to be a very fine distinction, however as I've said its consequences are very different. You may say that I'm splitting hairs here. My response is that the enemy is splitting electrons, never mind atoms.

Well now that I've played devil's advocate, I'll go away.

Sláinte

Seán Ryan

really??

by slack jawed yoked out of it

Sat Dec 17, 2005 09:28

"Everybody is an anarchist."

This is an incredibly dumb statement. Simply because the vast majority of people involved in politics dont subscribe to anarchism. Labelling the populace as anarchists because they refuse to pay a parking fine or dont have a TV license is ridiculous. Unless they're actually actively involved in promoting, organising, and struggling towards their supposed political goal, they're no more help than someone sitting in the pub every night.

Besides, any comment addressing/generalising the public as being of one ideology without their consent is dangerous, almost Stalinist. "You're going to be defined as workers. Glorious, socialist workers." You see the similarities?

by pat

Sat Dec 17, 2005 15:21

From the black block havin’ a go, to the clown army tickling cops and putting flowers in their hair, from marches to smashing McDonalds, gluing locks to throwing bricks and even it seems going to rock concerts– all of these activities have had the term direct action applied to them incorrectly.

And you are the judge of what is and what is not direct action? if some body smashes up a mcdonalds to shut it down then that is a direct action against macdonalds.
gluing a lock if done to stop say a digger from working then thats also is a direct action. sounds like orgainse is trying to justify not being in scotland, feeling out of the loop? refering to a second world war booklet on direct action seems alittle out dated.

From where do rights arise?

Sat Dec 17, 2005 23:05

Dear Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. slack jawed yokel,

I note that you feel the need to express your opinion. The fact that you feel you have the right to do this is an example of your anarchistic tendencies. After all, I didn't give you the right to reply to me. You took it.

You seem to be under the very common misapprehension that anarchy is a political entity only. It isn't. And you seem to believe that a singular point on a very large scale philosophy, is in fact the whole philosophy. Anarchy begins in the mind, and where it goes after that is up to the individual anarchist. No singular conformist view can encompass it.

Rather than stigmatise everybody, with the "one ideology," when I refer to humanity at large as being anarchists, I am referring to the diversity of humanity. I am pointing to the fact that everybody, including you and I, are different. And that the right to be different is a primal anarchistic assertation. On the other hand, from what you've said, I get the impression, that you believe that somebody who spraypaints an "Anarchy" symbol on their t-shirt, goes out and acts like a lower lifeform for a short while, comes home and declares themselves an anarchist, is in fact an anarchist. Well in truth that person may be an anarchist, I don't know, but I do know that their actions are tainted more by conformity, than by will alone, and furthermore, the view of anarchy that you have is a media inspired fallacy, at least that's my opinion on it.

You may disagree. That's fine by me, I'm not afraid of criticism, I embrace it. Criticism allows me to see my mistakes, and consolidate and strengthen my views. In all fairness to you, your criticism has not done this for me.

Now having said all that, it occurs to me that you called my statement dumb. I take it that by "dumb" you mean stupid.

I must admit that that possibility has not escaped me.

I might indeed be stupid.

But it is my right to be wrong or indeed right.

That's anarchy for you.

I'm possibly being unfair to you here, in that I've taken my time in reading and digesting, what you've had to say, and my initial irritation was damped through the course of time. Your reply was short and seemed irratated. It's possible that the brevity of your argument, defies my intellectual capacity or lack of, to see the core of your argument.

So if you fancy elaborating a little, I'd be happy to discuss it with you.

Sláinte,

Seán.

eh?

by author - Organise!

Sun Dec 18, 2005 18:53

I don't actually think Organise! feel the need to justify not having been in Scotland (I take it yer referring to the G8 protest).

Nor do I see any problems in referring to Rudolf Rockers work in the article whether the book was written in the WWII era or not - there is also reference to anti-war direct action and wildcat industrial action by postal workers, and direct action in Spain that are all more recent and more effective examples of direct action than smashing a window or two at McDonalds.

You stick to futile stunts if thats what you're into but direct action really needs a bit more grown up discussion and thought put into what it is and why its useful.

and?

by spitty spitty two shoes

Sun Dec 18, 2005 19:59

"You stick to futile stunts if thats what you're into but direct action really needs a bit more grown up discussion and thought put into what it is and why its useful."

plenty of grown up discussion there eh?

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Direct Action Gets The Goods

Comments (6 of 6)