Enough with direct action! Long live direct action!

Another day of direct action, another day of semantic stretching. Kids run inside the Tory’s HQ, break the windows, or maybe they stop a coal power station, or they enact a political performance in a socially sensitive place. All legitimate and often noble means of protesting, but, still, their classification under the label of ‘direct action’ seems to me to be a misguided attempt to stretch the meaning of this expression.

Direct action, in its original and maybe more intuitive meaning, defines that type of action that aims at the direct and unmediated implementation of social change or at the construction of new worlds. Also, to say it with Donald Rooum (1992), ‘Direct Action originally meant action such as strikes and sabotage, intended to have an immediate effect on a situation, as distinct from political activity which might have roundabout effect through representatives, or demonstrative activity whose effect was to get publicity.’

Is it really appropriate to call ‘direct action’ those activities of protest that lately have been featuring under such a name in students’ leaflets as well as in many a newspapers’ headlines? Wouldn’t it be better to call them with their proper name? Maybe the reason why this has not happen yet is not just a matter of semantic confusion, but rather of fear. Indeed, the conceptual category to which such actions really belong is scary, almost unnamable. Its name is insurrection.

It is important to keep the two words separated, so not to miss any of their potential. However, there is a very strong link between insurrection and direct action which shouldn’t be forgotten. It is a link of the alchemical type, similar to the connection between solve et coagula (dissolve and coagulate). Often, it is necessary to violently break with the existing structures, in order to make the appearance of another world possible. And yet, such a connection does not necessarily unfold following this order. It often happens that the creation of new possible worlds precedes the violent break with the existing one, or that the two processes happen at the same time.

The challenge, today, in a moment of merciless conservative repression and of rising social unrest, is for an action that is at the same time insurrectionary and directly constructive. This means radicalizing both lines of intervention, according to the different nature of their potentials. On the one hand, the assault on palaces of power has to be integrated with a broader definition of targets, which should include financial centres as well as environmental targets, right-wing propaganda organs and repressive institutions. On the other, the focus should be on the creation of other possible structures of coexistence, such as funds of mutual economic aid, food cooperatives, alternative energy systems, independent universities, autonomous radical publishers and so on.

Other forms of struggle, most of which identify themselves under the name ‘resistance’, would risk to fall short in fulfilling the potential both of direct action, and of insurrectionary action. There is an innate conservatism in the idea of ‘resistance’, as if the struggle was for the maintenance of a pre-existing order, rather than for the creation of a new one. On the other hand, as alchemists have been saying for centuries, the art of dissolving and coagulating is a quest for an as yet unseen balance that is worth the difficulty and even the pain of its conceptualization, before that of its achievement.

This is indeed a hard challenge to undertake, as it forces us to accept the possibility of actually winning the struggle against the existing social order and then having to face the terrifying scenario in which we are able to autonomously recreate our social and individual lives.

Some might call such an accomplishment ‘revolution’. In fact, this definition couldn’t be more precise, although according to a sense of the word that is often forgotten. Imagining a victory, today, means imagining a situation in which our lives are able to express their full potential (such as a planet going through a full ‘revolution’) in a non-alienated and non-hierarchical social environment. This is the reason, in an ultimate analysis, why the newspapers that warn their readers about the anarchist essence of the current struggles are not wrong at all.

Today, to win both on the level of insurrection and of direct action means to oppose through popular violence the violence of the State, global capital and religion, as well as creating a new, fair, autonomous society of free people.

In other words, accomplishing anarchism.

Federico Campagna

23 November 2010, London