In the words of a friend editing a rough draft of a project of mine, explaining the strength of his critique: “You’re playing with fire. It’s necessary, but it’s a very serious responsibility. You’re responsible to [the project] but you’re also responsible to the anarchist ideal in the name of which you work.”
In that spirit, some excerpts and explorations from Direct Action: An Ethnography by David Graeber:
To sum up then: direct action represents a certain ideal– in its purest form, probably unattainable. It is a form of action in which means and ends become, effectively, indistinguishable; a way of actively engaging with the world to bring about change, in which the form of action– or at least, the organization of action– is itself a model for the change one wishes to bring about. At its most basic, it reflects a very simple anarchist insight: that one cannot create a free society through military discipline, a democratic society by giving orders, or a happy one through joyless self-sacrifice. At its most elaborate, the structure of one’s own act becomes a kind of micro-utopia, a concrete model for one’s vision of a free society. As Emma Goldman (and others) observed, the fact that the authorities define such acts as crimes is not a problem in this regard– insofar as it constantly reminds actors to take responsbibility for their actions, and behave with courage and integrity, it can be a great advantage. The problems, rather, come when one moves beyond confrontation to other forms of engagement with a world organized along different lines.
A revolutionary strategy based on direct action can only succeed if the principles of direct action become institutionalized. Temporary bubbles of autonomy must gradually turn into permanent, free communities. However, in order to do so, those communities cannot exist in total isolation; neither can they have a purely confrontational relation with everyone around them. They have to have some way to engage with larger economic, social, or political systems that surround them. This is the trickiest question because it becomes extremely dificult for those organized on radically democratic lines to so integrate themselves in any meaningfuk way in larger structures without having to make endless compromises in their founding principles. For direct action-based groups, even working in alliance with radical NGOs or labor unions has often created what seem like insuperable problems. On a more immediate level. the strategy depends on the dissemination of the model: most anarchists, for example, do not see themselves as a vanguard whose historical role is to ‘organize’ other communities, but rather as one community setting an example other can imititate. The approach– it’s often refered to as ‘contamination’– is premised on the assumption of that the experience of freedom is infectious, that anyone who takes part in a direct action is likely to be permanently transformed by the experience, and want more. (210-211)
On anarchism
“Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy; anarchism, an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.” (211)
“Anarchism is not an attempt to put a certain sort of theoretical vision into practice, but is instead a constant mutual exchange between inspirational visions, anti-authoritarian attitudes, and egalitarian practices.” (221-222)
“It’s when … a revulsion against oppression causes people to try to live their lives in a more self-consciously egalitarian fashion, when they draw on those experiences to produce visions of a just society, when those visions, in turn, cause them to see existing social arrangements as even more illegitimate and obnoxious– that one can begin to talk about anarchism.” (215)
“If one looks at what these supposed founding figures [of anarchist theory-- Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin] actually said, one finds most of them did not really see themselves as creating a new theory. They were more likely to see themselves giving a name and voice to a certain kind of insurgent common sense, one they assumed to be as old as history.” (213)
On direct action:
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” (514)
“[Direct action means] acting as if, at least as a moral entity, the state does not exist.” (204)
“Direct action means insisting on acting as if one is already free.” (207)
“On the one hand, [global justice activists] set out to expose the undemocratic nature of the WTO and similar institutions that, they felt, together formed the backbone of an unaccountable world neoliberal government that sought the power to suppress existing democratic rights in the name of corporate power. On the other hand, they were determined to organize the whole action according to directly democratic principles and thus provide a living example of how genuine egalitarian democratic decision making might work. When dealing with global institutions, this is about as direct as an action can get.” (210)
It is here I would emphasize above all the influence of feminism. Historically, the contemporary anarchist emphasis on process emerged … more than anything else from organizational crises in feminist collectives in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is what finally drove organizers to begin seriously looking at Quaker practice, and, eventually, developing the whole apparatus of affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus, and facilitation. Even more, one can see the emphasis of feminism in the whole direction of the movement. ‘Situations’ do not create themselves. There’s an enormous amount of work involved. For much of human history, of course, what has been taken as politics has consisted of a series of theatrical stages, and dramatic performances carried out upon them. One of the great gifts of feminism to political thought has been to continually remind us of the people making and preparing and cleaning those stages and, even more, maintaining the invisible structures that make them possible– who have, overwhelmingly, been women. The normal process of politics is to make all those people disappear. One might say that one impact of feminism on direct action circles has been to foster a new political ideal that aims to efface the difference. To put it another way, this new ideal insists that action is only genuinely revolutionary when the process of production of situations is just as liberating as the situations themselves. The entire process becomes an experiment, one might say, in the realignment of imagination, in the creation of truly non-alienated forms of experience.” (532-3)