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

VI. Amplifying the Democratic Potential of Direct Action 
 
Throughout this chapter, I have argued that direct action politics can be defended on 
democratic grounds and, more broadly, can be useful for the theory and practice of radical 
democracy. By focusing on direct action as a democratic practice, I have hoped to reaffirm the 

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role of power in a vibrant democratic politics. Democracy is not just about communicating or 
having a say.
This and similar expressions are invented to pull the teeth out of democracy: 
democracy means giving the people ‘a voice,’ ‘the right to dissent,’ ‘a chance to 
express their views,’ ‘their day in court,’ ‘an opportunity to stand up and being 
counted,’ – that is, anything but power (Lummis 1996, 18). 
Direct action is one way in which people can mobilize power and, as such, should be considered 
as a core democratic practice. That said, and as I have already noted, this is not to say that all 
direct action is necessarily democratic. It is not. However, both the disruptive and prefigurative 
dimensions of direct action have democratic 
potential
. In this final section of the chapter, I 
outline in brief some strategies for amplifying the democratic potential in direct actions – 
guidelines, that is, for the enactment of collective power in ways that tend to foster democracy. I 
mean these, on the one hand, as preliminary suggestions for activists who wish to enable the 
power of direct action in ways that enhance the democratic reverberations from such actions and, 
on the other hand, as a rough metric for theorists that wish to assess the extent to which a 
particular direct action is likely to have democratic or antidemocratic reverberations. I do not 
mean to suggest that direct actions that do not follow these strategies are never justified, but 
rather that their democratic potential is less robust. 
Democratic direct actions should aim to create spaces or situations in which others can 
be(come) political actors and exercise political freedom
. The Occupy movement is an excellent 
recent example of this dynamic. The direct action of occupation establishes a space that others 
may use for dialogue, debate, education and further action. Perhaps Occupy’s most enduring 
success is precisely that it provided spaces for people to experience the joys and frustrations of 
acting in concert. To take a different example, consider the 2006 immigrant rights protests in 
which “US citizens…marched alongside of the undocumented…[and] made it safer and more 

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possible for undocumented people to occupy the streets and make political demands themselves” 
(Ferguson 2012, 156). Direct actions that create and defend public spaces are probably the types 
of actions that have the most straight-forward democratic potential. However, we should not 
reduce democratic potential of direct action to this capacity alone. 
Democratic direct actions should leave physical and/or metaphorical space for others to 
act, rather than monopolizing spaces.
The “St. Paul Principles,” which evolved in the planning 
process for protests of the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC) in the Twin Cities. The 
principles were necessary because there were (at least) two very different visions for how the 
demonstrations should manifest. On the one hand, the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anarchist 
organizing body, sought to facilitate a militant shut-down of the RNC, while the Coalition to 
March on the RNC and Stop the War wanted to pursue a permitted and family-friendly march.
The St. Paul Principles, signed on to by all three of the above groups, specified (among other 
things) that: a) “Our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of 
other groups,” and b) “The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of 
time or space” (RNC ’08 Report). More broadly, while democratic direct actions do not require 
the agreement of all who are likely to be affected (an impossible ideal, in any case), they should 
avoid dictating the actions of others and, more strongly, should leave space for others to act 
differently.