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

a priori
. Practitioners of direct action often reject the 
violence/nonviolence dichotomy entirely, arguing instead for a diversity of tactics.
19
This is not 
to say that one cannot argue for or against particular instances of direct action as being “good” or 
“bad,” “revolutionary” or “counter-revolutionary,” “democratic or “anti-democratic.” However, 
19
“I am not an advocate of violence, and neither is anyone else I know within the anarchist and anti-authoritarian 
movement. We are advocates of a diversity of tactics, of the full range of tactics that will effectively lead to a 
revolution…As such, we should be called, and call ourselves, proponents of revolutionary activism” (Gelderloos 
2005, 4). Moreover, Gelderloos (
ibid.
100), argues that there is no nonviolent option, -- that, in short, “nonviolence” 
is not nonviolent: “The global system and everyone in it are soaked in violence; it is enforced, coerced, 
involuntary…Our options [are]: actively supporting the violence of the system; tacitly supporting that violence by 
failing to challenge it;…or pursuing new and original ways to 
fight and destroy
that system.” 

---

121 
what makes something direct action is not the presence (or absence) of violence. In short, there 
is neither a principled nor a historical reason for 
defining
direct action in this way. Carter claims, 
for example, that “direct action can…be distinguished absolutely from planting bombs and 
assassination attempts” (
ibid
. 8). However, she provides absolutely no basis for making this 
distinction. That is, she provides no reason 
why
such actions are “absolutely” not cases of direct 
action, giving this reader the impression that she defines direct action so as to only include 
actions she approves of, or that are otherwise basically compatible with liberal rights and/or the 
state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. Thus, while many contemporary activists use the term 
direct action to distinguish militant from passive resistance or to denote a commitment to 
diversity of tactics rather than strict nonviolence (Graeber 2009, 204-211), my point is that the 
level of militancy or violence is not the defining feature of direct action and that it does not make 
sense to write out the possibility that direct action can ever be violent.
20
Moreover, Carter goes further: she contends that direct action does not involve “force.”
Specifically, she argues that the “move towards more coercive and confrontational modes of 
direct action does not…mean that direct action normally includes use of force” (
ibid
. 7). This is 
a strange claim to make for two reasons. First, “coercive and confrontational modes of direct 
action” appear throughout the historical examples of direct action that she herself provides (e.g. 
anarcho-syndicalist labor struggles, the anti-war movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the 
environmental movement in the 1990s and the anti-globalization/anti-capitalist movement during 
the late 1990s and 2000s). Thus, it is not new that direct action involves confrontational and 
forceful actions. Secondly, even many adherents to strictly nonviolent forms of direct action 
understand successful nonviolent action as a kind of force. Take, for example, Ackerman and 
20
This is not to say that such direct actions are necessarily democratic or normatively desirable. Here I am simply 
trying to develop an account of direct action that I put in conversation with democratic theory later in the paper.

---

122 
Duvall’s (2000) classic account of 20
th
century nonviolent movements, which bears the title