Direct Action

Salvatore Paolo De Rosa

Related terms: anarchism, autonomy, blockade, civil disobedience, climate justice, occupation, prefiguration, resistance, self-organisation, ZAD (Zone à Défendre)

‘Direct action’ refers to a set of practices expressed by individuals, social movements and organised groups through which a political objective is pursued directly and personally, without resorting to political mediation (e.g., through elected representatives or formal institutional channels).

The key distinctions between direct actions and relying on established channels of governance, negotiation, and legal systems lie in who is posited as holding the power to act and how legitimacy is derived. Those performing direct actions are personally, affectively, and immediately realising their power to intervene and change reality, by applying pressure or by providing services, thus bypassing official intermediaries. Through direct action, legitimacy is withdrawn from systems deemed unjust, and instead it is invested in principles of self-governance, autonomy, ethical and environmental values, even when the implication of forfeiting institutional legitimacy is harsher state repression and criminalisation.

‘Direct actions’ are thus a tactic of intervention that individuals or groups exercise to realise and to dramatise what they believe are their own rights or the rights of others, both humans and non-humans. They could be practical or symbolic, and often are both at the same time. Occupying a corporate building or sabotaging infrastructure materially prevents their use but also reveals moral contradictions and strategic weakness (Fithian 2019). By disrupting, reversing or overhauling the policed spectacle of the status quo (Rancière 2015), direct action can make power relations perceptible, support the building of a strong movement, draw media attention, pressure decision-makers, and demonstrate the resolve and power of a movement.

Being a tactic that can be applied for many different aims, direct action has historically also been utilised by reactionary forces. Italian fascist formations, for example, before reaching power, made extensive use of non-mediated political violence, such as terrorism, assassinations, and the threat of insurrection. However, this entry is concerned with direct action attributable to emancipatory movements, following the definition of David Graeber, for whom ‘direct action’ is a way of acting politically “as if one were already free” (Graeber 2009).

What Direct Action Does, Then and Now

On the one hand, forms of direct action are employed to stop the functioning of institutions or infrastructures that deny or abuse certain rights, through obstruction, blockades, occupations, strikes, or even sabotage and destruction (Sovacool & Dunlap 2022). It can unfold through peaceful methods (as in the case of strikes and civil disobedience practices) or through more combative and even belligerent methods (as in the case of urban riots, or self-defence militias, as in Rojava or Chiapas).

On the other hand, direct action is also the basis of self-organisation for the provision of services, or for the resolution of social problems, against or independently of the state. This includes soup kitchens, community clinics, self-organised markets, solidarity networks between cities and the countryside, and informal support groups for migrants and other marginalised categories.

Other forms of direct action comprise passive resistance or non-cooperation, expressed as the refusal to follow orders or laws that are considered unjust (Scott 1985).

Direct action is fully part of the long history of emancipatory social struggles. The Industrial Workers of the World union mentions the term “direct action” in a publication on the Chicago strike of 1910 (Thompson & Murfin 1976). The American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre wrote the essay “Direct Action” in 1912, offering historical examples such as the American anti-slavery movement (de Cleyre 1912).

Anarchist movements are among those that have contributed the most to the diffusion and experimentation of direct action, considering their rejection of party politics, hierarchical bureaucratic institutions, and political representation in general (Graeber 2009). The central contribution of anarchism to debates on direct action is the theoretical and practical insistence that the means must embody the ends: the modalities and the organisation of the action itself must prefigure the desired society. This principle of prefigurative politics directly challenges statist and hierarchical models of social change by establishing direct action as a non-reformist, non-electoral, and fundamentally anti-authoritarian path to liberation. More than just a tactic, anarchist approaches transform direct action into a principle of organisation and governance.

Recent historical examples can be found in the opposition to nuclear power during the 1980s, with the tampering of power plants and the blocking of trains for the transport of materials. Further examples would be the pacifist movement throughout its history, through sit-ins, sabotages, and blockades of arms transport; but also the feminist groups in Italy that made possible clandestine abortions in the 1970s; or the occupations and the cultivation of land by landless peasants, as in the case of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement.

Nowadays, ecological and climate movements have picked up the tradition of direct action and are applying it with new force, also fueling debates on the forms, purposes, and areas in which it can be effective (Malm 2021). To stop projects, close plants, attract attention, or exert pressure for political change, grassroots movements, territorial defense committees, and ecological and climate activists have blocked or occupied extraction sites, mines, terminals, oil platforms, ports, plastic and fertilizer factories, city centers, highways, railways, construction sites, government buildings, corporate offices, museums, shopping malls, and more.

In Europe, activist coalitions have been formed to specifically target fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure. Ende Gelände (“Hereto and no further”), a German coalition that blocks coal mines and fossil fuel plants since 2014, is a striking example, inspiring many emulators (Ende Gelände 2020). Since 2018, the meteoric rise of the Extinction Rebellion (XR), especially in cities in the Global North, has had the merit of involving large sectors of the population in what they define as nonviolent direct action (NVDA) to demand changes in climate narratives and policies (Extinction Rebellion 2019). They have done so through mass rallies that block city centres, avoiding confrontation and accepting arrests. In a French context, groups belonging to the Les Soulevaments de la Terre coalition have integrated a “diversity of tactics” into their actions, including mass demonstrations, blockades, and sabotage of the water basins they contest.

More recently, there has been a proliferation of groups derived from Extinction Rebellion, such as Ultima Generazione in Italy and Just Stop Oil in the UK, which raise the level of nonviolent direct action by continuously repeating blockades of busy highways and fossil plants for days, and by multiplying attack sites to demand climate action and justice. Tactics of sabotage are also spreading, e.g., via the proliferation of groups that deflate SUV tyres in cities, directly disable weapon manufacturers, internet cables and electrical connections to factories and financial centres, and intervene in the defence of individuals targeted by rising neo-fascist policies.

Based on traditions of resistance that go back centuries, Indigenous movements around the world practice direct actions to challenge extractive projects in their territories, through occupations and more confrontational tactics, to stop fossil infrastructure or the destruction of ecosystems, and to reinvigorate their agricultural, spiritual, and political traditions. A compelling example, in North America, is the Standing Rock camp built to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline, which provided a platform for the convergence of Indigenous nations, environmentalists, anarchists, and residents. Activists used the language of climate justice and Indigenous self-determination to animate an explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-colonial project of transformation and decolonisation for all (Estes 2019; The Red Deal 2021).

Contemporary, non-combative direct actions reaffirm in the present the history of interventions by the Socialist Case del Popolo (“People's Houses”) in Italy, and by other political groups founded on self-organisation and autonomy, such as the Black Panthers in the USA and the customary practices of Indigenous communities. These forms of direct action include instances of grassroots politics rooted in mutual aid networks, autonomous forms of self-defence, service provision, and support for social reproduction, and include attempts to build a counter-power without mediations (Crow 2014).

Direct action in the field of climate justice is thus a method of attack, defence, and self-determination. It is used to stop the damage caused by the dominant system (from climate change through genocide and ecocide to forms of slow and immediate violence on people, animals, and ecosystems) and the solutions it proposes (Dunlap 2024). It is also used to disentangle in practice the reproduction of life from fossil capital and capitalism in general, through prefiguration strategies that make a future world based on cooperation, ecological sustainability, and community self-determination a reality in the present.

Environmental Humanities and Direct Action

Direct action offers the environmental humanities a powerful conceptual and practical lens for examining, interpreting, and influencing ecological and social conflicts.

First of all, focusing on direct action moves environmental ethics from abstract theory into material practice. It affords and makes felt questions such as: how are environmental values like biocentrism or ecocentrism enacted by activists who risk their bodies to protect non-human entities? (Pulido 2003).

Secondly, the defence of a specific ecosystem brings forward non-human agency, as activists often act as protectors speaking for the land, rivers, or trees. Such actions give weight to the idea that these entities have “rights” worth defending (Stone 2010) and embody inter-species solidarity and advocacy (Abram 1996). When the body of the activist is recast as a material buffer between capital/state violence and vulnerable ecosystems, this pushes the analysis beyond anthropocentrism, necessitating the development of new critical tools to interpret the success or failure of actions based on ecological outcomes, not just political or legal ones (Barca 2020).

Finally, the knowledge needed and generated by direct actions is localised, embodied, and context-dependent. Activists learn the ecology, geology, and politics of a place through the act of defending it (Escobar 2020). Direct action thus becomes a method of radical environmental literacy concerned with the specifics of a place, encouraging the study of activist testimony, protest literature, and on-the-ground ethnography as valid forms of situated environmental knowledge.

References

Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage.

Barca, Stefania. 2020. Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crow, Scott. 2014. Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

de Cleyre, Voltairine. 1912. “Direct Action.”

Dunlap, Alexander. 2024. This System Is Killing Us: Land Grabbing, the Green Economy, and Ecological Conflict. London: Pluto Press.

Ende Gelände. 2020. An Activist’s Guide to Ende Gelände.

Escobar, Arturo. 2020. Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Extinction Rebellion. 2019. This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. London: Penguin.

Fithian, Lisa. 2019. Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Graeber, David. 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Malm, Andreas. 2021. How to Blow Up a Pipeline. London: Verso Books.

Pulido, Laura. 2003. “River of Resistance: Critical Collaboration and the Dilemmas of Power and Ethics.” Ethics, Place & Environment 6 (1): 46–52.

Rancière, Jacques. 2015. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Sovacool, Benjamin K., and Alexander Dunlap. 2022. “Anarchy, War, or Revolt? Radical Perspectives for Climate Protection, Insurgency and Civil Disobedience in a Low-Carbon Era.” Energy Research & Social Science 86: 102416.

Stone, Christopher D. 2010. Should Trees Have Standing? Law, Morality, and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Red Nation. 2021. The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions.

Thompson, Fred W., and Patrick Murfin. 1976. The I.W.W.: Its First Seventy Years, 1905–1975. Chicago, IL: Industrial Workers of the World.