Direct action

KELLY MOORE and BENJAMIN SHEPARD

Direct action is strategic political activity in
which users seek redress by targeting the peo-
ple, institutions, and practices that they wish
to change. In contrast, indirect political action
uses intermediaries, such as elected representa-
tives, to effect change. Direct action is not only
an instrument to force others to change. Par-
ticipants in direct action often see themselves
as enacting the values that are important to
them, such as fellowship and nonhierarchical
relations. It is used by revolutionaries, religious
groups, and many others. Groups on the left,
right, and center of the political spectrum have
used direct action. Direct action is most com-
mon among groups that are prohibited from
or have limited access to legal participation
in institutionalized politics. These include, for
example, prisoners, members of ethnic, sex-
ual, and religious minorities, women in some
places and times, and students and other young
people.
Examples of direct action include block-
ades, encampments, occupations, vigils, and
street theater, refusal to pay taxes or salute of-
cials and royalty, and violence against people
and property. Adistinguishing quality of direct
action is that it is often reinvented rather than
being routinized for long periods of time. It is
distinct from retreatism and from immediate,
unplanned actions such as spontaneous riots.
Direct action can have immediate effects on
power relations, force a rethinking of those
relations, and symbolize and express newkinds
of relationships.
TYPES OF DIRECT ACTION
One of the hallmarks of direct action is that
it is often specic to a time, place, and prob-
lem. While some forms of direct action are
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements,
Edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam.
2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbespm431
modular, spreading from place to place and
across different contexts and users, many forms
of direct action are quickly defeated by oppo-
nents. Activists engage inwhat McAdam(1983)
calls tactical innovation, or efforts to develop
new techniques that opponents cannot quickly
counter. Yet direct action can be categorized
in some general but overlapping categories,
including occupations and blockades, sabotage
and slow-downs, play and mockery, witnessing,
and violence against people and material things.
Occupations andblockades encompass the use
of spaces for purposes other than for what they
were intended in order to disrupt routine prac-
tices and draw attention to their immorality.
Examples include sailing into nuclear testing
zones, sit-ins, human chains, marches, ash-
mobs, parades, landoccupations, andattaching
people to objects using locks and other tools.
Sabotage and slow-downs include actions that
make routine action more difcult by making
it costly and time-consuming to continue in a
routine manner. Tree spiking, changing images
on advertisements such as billboards, pouring
blood on draft card les, hacking or disrupt-
ing computer systems, destroying or hobbling
machinery, and working at a very slow pace
are some important examples of sabotage and
slow downs. Not all forms of direct action are
confrontational or angry. Play and mockery are
oftenlled with humor that canencourage par-
ticipants andaudiences torethinkwhat kinds of
social and political relations are possible, and
give participants a feeling of power. Efgies,
clowning, guerilla theater, street parties, and
humor used in sight of targets are examples
of this type of direct action. Witnessing is
the sharing of ones moral convictions. While
often associated with religious groups, espe-
ciallyChristians, witnessingis the act of publicly
identifying ones moral commitments, partic-
ularly in the face of arrest or repression, as a
means of convincing others of ones seriousness
and intentions. Vigils, hunger strikes, refusal to
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pay taxes, self-immolation, andaccepting arrest
or beatings are examples of witnessing. Finally,
violence against people and things can destroy
what participants see as the causes or visible
representations of the power relationships they
wish to end. Violence can take the form of
assassinations, bombings, kidnapping, arson,
hijacking, torture, and prison breaks that are
organized by individuals or by groups such as
militias.
IMPORTANT HISTORICAL SOURCES OF
DIRECT ACTION
Direct action is perhaps one of the oldest and
most universal forms of political action. It is
not specic toany formof government, appear-
ing in totalitarian systems, liberal democracies,
feudal systems, and nearly every other form
of governance. One early example is described
in Aristophanes play Lysistrata (c. 411 bce)
in which Greek women, who were not by law
Greek citizens and could not vote, withheld
sex to force their husbands to end the Pelo-
ponnesian War. Other early forms of direct
action include medieval peasants refusal to
plow elds or tender what they owed to their
rulers unless their demands were met; soldiers
in nearly every country and time period who
collectively refuse to ght; and public mock-
ery of ofcials. Some forms of direct action
are modular, that is, they move from place to
place and time period to time period. Other
forms, such as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century English tradition of rough music, or
the practice of publicly humiliating community
wrongdoers through boisterous, noisy, the-
atrical processions using musical instruments,
bones, efgies, and other props in front of the
targets home or business, are shorter-lived.
Although ubiquitous, direct action was not
self-consciously theorized and codied as a
form of political action until the late nine-
teenth century. Labor activists and revolution-
aries, especially anarchists in Western Europe,
Russia, and the United States, called for the
use of direct action rather than the ballot
box to challenge the state. Anarchists rejected
the moral legitimacy and utility of the state,
and advocated the organization of individu-
als into self-governing groups and federations.
Important theorists of direct action include the
Russian Peter Kropotkin (18421921), and the
Americans Emma Goldman (18691940) and
Voltairine De Cleyre (18661912). All three
advocated that workers refuse to participate
in exploitative labor. De Cleyre and Goldman
called for strikes, for work slowdowns, and vio-
lence against property, as well as advocating for
an end to marriage, which they saw as a form
of economic oppression.
Another important source of direct action is
religion. Many religious traditions have strict
injunctions against certain forms of action
and require others. These injunctions have
served as the basis for resistance to politi-
cal, social, and economic rules. In the West,
Christian Anabaptist traditions have served as
a basis for resistance to slavery and warfare;
Hinduism, Catholicism, Islam, and Buddhism
have also served as theological bases for direct
action. Indian political leader Mohandas K.
Gandhi (18691948) joined religious practices
with anarchist calls for refusal to participate
in unjust systems. His method, called Satya-
graha, or the way of truth, greatly inu-
enced other uses of direct action in the twen-
tieth and twenty-rst centuries. Satyagraha
was inspired by the writings of Leo Tolstoy
(18281910) and John Ruskin (18191900)
and by Gandhis Hindu religious beliefs. The
core principle of Satyagraha was the appeal
to the moral goodness of opponents, accept-
ing the consequences including violence and
incarceration of refusing to participate in
unjust systems (Diwakar 1948). Users of Satya-
graha were required to make sacrices, such
as fasting, and to morally prepare themselves
for disobeying unjust systems. Between 1904
and 1913, Gandhi worked for equal rights for
Indians in South Africa. Thousands of people
went to jail for refusing to pay an annual tax
levied on former indentured servants, and for
refusing to carry identication papers that the
government required of Indians. He later used
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this same method to help Indians in India to
win freedom from British rule in 1947.
Gandhis methods inspired religiously based
peace and civil rights activists in the United
States in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Men
who refused to ght during World War II
were given conscientious objector status, and
assigned to work camps. At the end of the
war, some conscientious objectors helped to
generate direct actions against the cold war
weapons buildup occurring in Europe, the
United States, and in the Soviet Union. These
actions included peace marches, boats sailed
into nuclear test zones, and refusal to partici-
pate in civil defense drills. Civil rights activists
in the United States, including the Reverend
MartinLuther King Jr, Rosa Parks, James Bevel,
Septima Clark, and Myles Horton, learned and
taught about Satyagraha-based civil disobedi-
ence techniques. These were used in a series
of campaigns to end segregation in the South-
ern United States between 1954 and 1965 that
includedsit-ins, freedomrides, andmass arrest.
Direct action took a more carnival-like and
celebratory form when it was used by antiwar
and counterculture activists. The French Situa-
tionists International, inspired by Dadaismand
surrealism were a major inuence on this kind
of direct action. The Situationists advocated
the overthrowof capitalismby undermining its
key means of reproduction, including adver-
tising. The Situationists and other anarchistic
art community groups in the United States,
such as the Diggers, the Yippies, and the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, used carnivalesque
forms of action, including distributing free
food, putting on street theater, and mocking
traditional culture through new styles of dress.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, violent
direct action reemerged as the mass-based
political movements of the previous decade
dissolved. In the United States, Japan, Ger-
many, Italy, and other countries, small, armed,
underground clandestine groups such as the
Weather Underground, the Republic of New
Africa, and the Red Army Faction used rob-
bery, kidnapping, and murder to try to start a
revolution. In the southwestern United States
and in Great Britain, monkey wrenching, or
the destruction of machinery and other equip-
ment, was used by ecological activists.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, antinu-
clear activists followed their Christian faith
to oppose the creation of nuclear weapons.
Renowned campaigns targeted the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore,
California, and Pacic Gas and Electrics Dia-
blo Canyon energy plant near San Luis Obispo,
California. Here, a diverse group of activists
used a wide range of tactics to block the con-
struction of the plants, creating carnivals as
well as experiments in direct democracy, to
both pregure a better world and to persuade
others toabandonnuclear technologies (Eptein
1991).
Among the more important recent devel-
opments are the combination of celebratory
and confrontational action used across places
and times in quasi-modular forms. Global jus-
tice groups such as the Peoples Global Action,
for example, use festivity as well as more seri-
ous demonstrations to draw attention to their
claims and to build solidarity among them-
selves.
WHY USE DIRECT ACTION?
A major reason for the use of direct action
is that groups believe that targets hold power
illegitimately, so routine means of inuence,
such as voting to inuence governments, will
not address their grievances. Anarchists, for
example, believe that states are illegitimate, and
therefore use political tools outside the states
control to achieve their goal of small-group,
relatively autonomous governance. Similarly,
groups use direct action to change the practices
or existence of universities, police forces, reli-
gious hierarchies, or prisons. They may view
the existence of these institutions, not just their
policies, as detrimental.
Direct action is also used by groups who
deem a problem in need of immediate remedy.
Like a reghter who must destroy property
in order to save a life, some activists see direct
4 di rect acti on
action not as a choice, but a moral necessity
to prevent greater and signicant harm from
being done. AIDS activists have looked to this
logic in passing out syringes to drug users
to prevent disease transmission, and urban
gardening activists have built gardens in roads
while existing community gardens were being
destroyed. In these cases, groups use direct
action to prevent imminent harm.
Yet, some groups, such as Operation Rescue,
turned away from a commitment to nonvi-
olence. Here, American antiabortion activists
sought to prevent what they saw as imma-
nent harm in blockading abortion clinics or
shooting abortion providers (Lovell 2009). In
1991, Operation Rescue started the Summer
of Mercy, a wave of direct actions to block
access to an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas.
They rejected Gandhis principles of nonvio-
lence and, 18 years later, Dr George Tiller, a
doctor who was the target of this direct action,
was shot and killed by a man in contact with
Operation Rescue.
Some groups use direct action because the
other political and cultural tools available to
them, such as violence, petitioning, or voting,
are themselves morally objectionable or are
seen as futile. Direct action is, for many users,
an expression of who they are and what kind
of relationships they have with co-participants
and targets and want to have with them in the
future. Actions such as street parties, vigils, and
humor are expressions of emotional, moral,
and social ties as much as means to an end.
Particularly in highly repressive systems
where there are limited or no formal ways of
affecting groups who are in power, challengers
have little choice but to use direct action
to acquire new benets. People who are
imprisoned or enslaved, for example, may use
work slow downs or strategic incompetence
to force opponents to concede in some way.
The less power groups have, the more likely
they are to face serious repression for using
subterfuge to gain power.
Finally, direct action exemplies new ways
of living. Playful actions, such as clowning and
wearing costumes, dancing and playing music,
for example, exemplify a celebratory and joy-
ful life. Refusing to participate in an activity,
such as conscription or degrading or danger-
ous work and accepting the consequences can
exemplify a moral commitment to living a just
and humane life.
In practice, many motivations are often
blended together, and not all motivations are
equally salient for all users of direct action.
STUDYING DIRECT ACTION
Direct action is studied using a variety of
methods. There are many studies of individual
groups and techniques, which are also widely
available in electronic form on blogs and web
sites. Systematic studies of direct action typ-
ically use eld observation and interviews,
surveys of actions, users, and consequences of
actions, and historical comparisons. Evidence
often comes from newspapers and other mass
media, personal and organizational correspon-
dence and records, images, police reports, and
interviews. The goals of most research studies
are to understand the meanings of direct action
for participants and observers, to understand
its effectiveness in changing relations of power
among users and targets, to understand its
moral and political sources, and to understand
how repression shapes the development and
effectiveness of direct action. Exemplary studies
include Gamsons (1975) study of the relation-
ship between tactics, organizational character,
and outcomes. In a study of direct action in
the United States between World War II and
1968, Tracy (1996) showed that users consid-
ered direct action to be politically important
not only because of its instrumental value, but
because it revealed the power of users beliefs.
Zwerman and Steinhoff (2005) studied armed
underground, clandestine groups in the United
States and Japan and showed that such groups
were likely to develop at the end of cycles of
mass-based protest and attendant increases in
repression. Earl (2006) and McAdam (1983)
also document the effects of repression. Shep-
ard (2011) documents the origins and mean-
ings of ludic, or playful direct action.
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SEE ALSO: Everyday activism; Gandhi,
Mahatma (18691948); King, Martin Luther, Jr
(19281968); Nonviolence/nonviolent action;
Religion and social movements; Tactical interac-
tion and innovation; Tactics; Violence and social
movements.
REFERENCES ANDSUGGESTEDREADINGS
Diwakar, R.R. (1948) Satyagraha: The Power of
Truth. H. Regnery, Hinsdale, IL.
Earl, J. (2006) Introduction: Repression and the
social control of protest. Mobilization 11(2),
129143.
Earl, J. (2011) Protest arrests and future protest par-
ticipation: The 2004 Republican National Con-
vention arrestees and the effects of repression.
In: Sarat, A. (ed.), Special Issue Social Move-
ments/Legal Possibilities Studies in Law, Politics,
and Society 54, 141173.
Eptein, B. (1991) Political Protest and Cultural Rev-
olution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and
1980s. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Gamson, W.A. (1990) The Strategy of Social Protest,
2nd edn. Wadsworthy, Belmont, CA. (Orig. pub.
1975.)
Lovell, J.S. (2009) Crimes of Dissent: Civil Disobe-
dience, Criminal Justice, and the Politics of Con-
science. New York University Press, New York.
McAdam, D. (1983) Tactical innovation and the
pace of insurgency. American Sociological Review
48, 735754.
Shepard, B. (2011) Play, Creativity, and Social Move-
ments: If I Cant Dance its not my Revolution.
Routledge, New York and London.
Tracy, J.A. (1996) Radical Pacism From the Union
Eight to the Chicago Seven. University of Chicago
Press, Chicago.
Zwerman, G., and Steinhoff, P. (2005). When
activists ask for trouble: State-dissident inter-
actions and the New Left. In: Davenport, C.,
Johnston, H., and Mueller, C. (eds), Repression
and Mobilization. University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, pp. 85107.