Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

taking power for themselves
. In 
this it is distinguished from most other forms of political action…[that] aim to get 
others to achieve our goals for us. Such forms of action operate on a tacit 
acceptance of our own powerlessness. They concede that we ourselves have 
neither the right nor the power to affect change…Direct action is not only a 
method of protest but also a way of ‘building the future now’…Any situation 
where people organize to extend control over their own circumstances without 
recourse to capital or state constitutes direct action (Sparrow n.d.; emphasis 
added). 
17
It is worth noting that some observers deny that the WTO shut-down was an act of direct action because “the 
means [were not] immediately also the ends” and because the protesters ultimately aimed to “influence the powers-
that-be by way of some imagined ‘public opinion,’ rather than accomplishing their goals directly (Beyer-Anderson 
2000, 11-12). Clearly, however, this view clashes the view of many social movement actors, including the Direct 
Action Network, who organized the WTO protests. In this paper, I take a more inclusive view of direct action: the 
means and ends must not always be identical (this is just an ideal), nor must direct action completely eschew a role 
for shaping “public opinion” – however, fictitious such a thing is – as part of a social change strategy. 

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In this sense, direct action occurs when people, by stepping outside of legally sanctioned modes 
of redress, claim their own power and simultaneously subvert presumptions about who has 
power in the first place. Direct action entails situations in which actors ‘take matters into their 
own hands” or “do it ourselves,” so to speak. Rather than asking or demanding that a power-
holder do something, citizens do it themselves – whether the ‘it’ is blocking the distribution of 
oil, preventing a shipment of weapons, housing people in an unused building, or constructing a 
community garden in a vacant lot. Because direct action “bypasses established political channels 
to accomplish objectives directly” (CrimethInc. n.d.), the practice of direct action should be 
distinguished from other sorts of political activity such as lobbying, petition-drives, rallies and 
demonstrations, all of which appeal to power-holders – such as government officials, corporate 
executives, landlords and police – and ask or demand that they change a law, policy or social 
structure. In contrast, “[e]xamples of Direct Action include blockades, pickets, sabotage, 
squatting, tree spiking, lockouts, occupations, rolling strikes, slowdowns, the revolutionary 
general strike…establishing our own organizations such as food co-ops and community access 
radio and TV” (Sparrow n.d.).
In this sense, direct action is a kind of “self-authorizing” action, an expression of political 
freedom that is authorized only by the participants in the action themselves. “[T]his is an 
intersubjective authorization: each of us acting in public authorizes the others, confirming and 
demonstrating…that we all have political freedom, that we all have the capacity and the right to 
shape the world in which we live” (Ferguson 2012, 156). Whereas government officials or 
property owners are authorized by political or legal processes to make decisions over a given 
space or issue, direct action involves people making (or attempting to make) a decision they are 
not officially authorized to make. Unlike other forms of political action that ask or demand 

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authorities to make a certain decision, direct action claims that it is not the authorities’ decision 
to make at all. 
The Two Sides of Direct Action: Disruption and Prefiguration 
I propose to distinguish two sides or dimensions of direct action, both of which are hinted 
at, but not adequately distinguished in the above quotes about and examples of direct action. The 
first side of direct action, I will characterize as 
disruptive 
direct action. We can see this 
conceptualization of direct action in phrases such as “open defiance” for Goldman, “destroy 
[state] power” for Graeber, and “a form of protest” for Sparrow, as well as in the examples of 
blocking weapons shipments and tree spiking. Disruptive direct action involves interventions on 
the established order that attempt to temporarily interrupt or permanently halt the operations of 
existing authorities. In this sense, “[d]irect action is…generally understood as a means for 
people to exert pressure on governments or other powerful institutions such as business 
corporations” through “tax refusal, strikes and boycotts, or by challenges to particular laws…or 
acts of physical obstruction” (Carter 2005, 3).
18
The shutdown of the WTO meeting in Seattle in 
1999 is perhaps the best known, large-scale example of disruptive direct action in recent 
memory.
The second side of direct action I will characterize as 
prefigurative
direct action. We can 
see this conceptualization of direct action in phrases such as “integrity, self-reliance and 
courage” for Goldman, “acting as if one is already free” for Graeber, “building the future now” 
for Sparrow, as well as in the examples of constructing a community garden and establishing 
18
While Carter’s book is useful in that it puts direct action in conversation with democracy (as I hope to do in this 
chapter), in my view she strays too far from the core meaning of direct action and, as a result, is willing to say that 
“purely symbolic protest, such as rallies, marches and vigils…are usually associated with direct action” and that 
“[a]ctivists are quite often engaging in symbolism rather than expecting to achieve their goal immediately.” (3) 
(Carter 2005, 3). In my view, she is overly willing to collapse direct action into other forms of (more symbolic) 
collective action – a move that unfortunately occludes the unique insights direct action holds for democratic theory. 

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community access radio and TV. Prefigurative direct action involves interventions that aim to 
address a need, solve a problem or create something new through actions that are a) unmediated 
by formal processes or existing authorities and b) aim to model a possible future society in the 
present (as the famous Industrial Workers of the World slogan goes, to “build the new world in 
the shell of the old”). “[P]ractising prefigurative politics means removing the temporal 
distinction between the struggle in the 
present
towards a goal in the 
future
; instead, the struggle 
and the goal, the real and the ideal, become one in the present” (Maeckelbergh 2009, 66-67).

From this perspective, direct action can be seen as a constructive power
 
that people have when 
they join together to shape the world by acting directly to build the institutions and relationships 
they wish to see. The factory takeover movement that emerged in Argentina during the 2001 
economic crisis, in which laid off workers occupied and self-managed their workplaces, offers an 
example of prefigurative direct action (Sitrin 2006). The workers’ end goal of finding stable, 
meaningful and democratic work is the simultaneously the means for achieving it. 
While I think it is useful to distinguish disruptive and prefigurative direct action, there are 
often significant overlaps between these two forms of direct action and direct actions, in practice, 
often combine both disruptive and prefigurative elements. A primarily disruptive direct action 
may also foster opportunity for prefigurative politics and, conversely, a primarily prefigurative 
direct action may tend toward the development of a disruptive politics. The previously 
mentioned WTO protests exemplify this dynamic. While the ostensible goal of the Direct Action 
Network was to shut down the WTO’s meetings, the protests provided an opportunity to practice 
and propagate techniques of decentralized, direct democracy. As Starhawk (2002, 405) 
describes it,
The participants in the action were organized into small units called affinity 
groups. Each group was empowered to make its own decisions on how it would 

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