Probably the saddest sign of our times is how many people respond with complete bewilderment if you mention direct action. Cutting border fences? punching nazis? sharing resources? blocking arms transports? building alternatives? They’re not even outraged, they’re just confused.
It’s like they’re so caught up in the spectacle of petitions, calling senators, ‘awareness’ and media visbility that they’ve completely forgotten that you can also just do shit without begging for permission.
Seriously, we’ve been so conditioned to seek permission for literally anything that the idea of just doing something yourself is seen as utterly unfeasible, pie in the sky, nonsense.
I for one am a huge believer in direct action and just making the changes we want to see instead of asking the powerful to implement them.
Want to house the homeless? Occupy some abandoned buildings. Want to replace your yard with a vegetable garden? Get you hands on some seeds and plant that shit. We can accomplish so much more by doing instead of begging.
Direct action takes a lot of work. Blocking a highway requires a lot of planning, and it’s high-risk. Planting a vegetable garden is awesome, but it requires a lot of time and energy and resources (and won’t be a suitable replacement for the grocery store). Stop acting shocked that people new to activism are hesitant about high risk labor intensive actions, and help people with the basics of organizing.
Plus, blocking a highway (for example) or like “occupying wall street” doesn’t actually DO anything
Sure, congrats, you got some media attention and pissed off a bunch of random people… but what did you actually accomplish? For “direct” action a lot of it seems more geared for attention/“awareness” than actually doing anything.
Like, remember the Seattle WTO protests in the 90s? The regular protestors did stuff w/ media, etc, but the “direct action”, “black bloc” people? They didn’t do shit- broke some windows, maybe burnt some cars- all they do is hurt retail workers and random people, the corporations don’t give a fuck. Same with the more recent WTO protests in Germany- yay, congrats, you lit your own city on fire and now the riot police are trying to corral you- wtf did you accomplish? All this does is delegitimize the broader movement (whatever it is) and make people generally afraid of your ideas.
I’m not a fan of direct actions that are only about the elusive goal of ‘awareness’ without direct results and I’m definitely not a fan of putting a lot of energy into targetting the big international summits. (The way I see it, what states are very good at is concentrating a lot of violence in one place and what they’re weak at is that they need to constantly disperse their forces to maintain the illusion of ‘law and order’. So if you want to put the power of the people on display, meeting the State’s forces in the exact place where they are concentrated is probably a bad idea and creating dispersed actions in unpredictable locations would be much more effective)
But let’s say you really really wanted to target the big International Summits and you really wanted the whole world to pay attention to all that’s bad about these summits. If that’s your goal, than militant, forceful direct action is certainly going to achieve this better than non-violence. Who remembers the WTO conference in Geneva in 1998? Or the WTO conferencd in Qatar in 2001? The WTO conference in Cancun in 2003? or if you want largely non-violent protests in the US around the same time period: who remembers the 2001 and 2002 IMF protests in Washington?
Yet people remember Seattle. If you put ‘Seattle 1999’ or ‘Seattle WTO’ into a search engine, articles about the protest far outnumber articles about the conference. Seattle is recognized by most observers as an event that brought a huge amount of attention to the antiglobalisation movement, their opinions and their goals.
Non-violent activists always claim success because they ended up giving
the interviews, but they ignore that no one would even have been
looking at Seattle in the first place if there hadn’t been riots.
But maybe you don’t want mass media attention, maybe you just want to inspire activists to continue to resist against injustice? In Seattle there was a very big non-violent blockade and a big black bloc. Both groups saw their own actions as succesful. But who inspired people? In the two years after Seattle, a handful of activists went around giving ‘non-violent action trainings’ based on their Seattle success stories, but those trainers did not create a large non-violent action moment and their non-violent blockade methods have not been widely adopted. On the other hand, the use of black bloc became much more popular in the US after 1999 and did not fade back into obscurity after 2 years the way the non-violent trainers did.
(Oh, and Indymedia, an important platform for independent reporting by activists themselves, was born in the Seattle protests and was succesful there because it documented the experiences of the ‘bad’ activists on their own terms and in doing to revealed the massive police brutality at these sorts of events.)
So even though I’m more of a fan of dispersed direct action with concrete material improvements or the seizing of long term space as goals, when I do look at the International Summits, it is obvious to me that the ‘bad’ activists achieved more than the polite activists.
QueerAnarchism 