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

 
Democratic direct action should tend toward tactics that are reproducible by others
.
Direct actions that are less likely to have democratic potential include a range of activities. On 
the one side, we might consider Greenpeace-style nonviolent actions that have huge budgets 
(required, for example, to enable teams to rappel off of buildings to hang a massive banner) or 
generally require arrest. These actions are not highly reproducible given the extensive monetary 

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legal resources needed to make them possible – they are, in short, the province of relatively 
privileged professional activists. On the other side, we might consider military-style bombing 
campaigns like those carried out by the Weather Underground. While, in an important sense, 
Weather Underground’s tactical approach differs radically from Greenpeace’s approach, the two 
share tactical choices that unlikely to result in mass reproduction of those tactics/actions. While 
there may be good reasons to pursue such tactics in certain circumstances, they are likely to lack 
significant democratic reverberations. Importantly, the issue here is not the high level of 
technical expertise or specialized knowledge involved in such actions. The Anonymous hacker’s 
movement, for example, involves skills that only a relatively small number of people share.
However, clearly those tactics have been reproducible and enabled the development of a global 
movement of hackers. Consider several other tactical innovations that are easily reproducible, 
have quickly moved across borders and have enabled others to successfully enact collective 
power. First, is the use of masks or bandanas to cover one’s face during a protest. During the 
2010 UK Student protests against education spending cuts and tuition fee increases. During the 
first major demonstration on November 10, in which the Conservative Party headquarters were 
occupied and ransacked by protesters, very few of the participants covered their faces. The 
result was, predictably, that the government used CCTV cameras and media images to identify 
individual participants and arrest them. The subsequent demonstrations, which maintained and 
even increased in militancy, saw many more students covering their faces – a move that enabled 
widespread confrontations and disruptions with lower risk of arrest for participants. More 
broadly, the “black bloc” tactic – in which participants not only cover their faces but also dress in 
nearly identical all-black clothing, as a way of maintaining anonymity in the face of pervasive 
surveillance during militant public actions – emerged in Germany’s autonomist movements in 

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the 1980s and has since spread across Europe and North America, as well as making a more 
recent appearance among youth in post-revolution Egypt. A variation on these tactical 
innovations is the “book bloc,” in which student demonstrators prepare giant shields that are 
painted to look like the cover of books. These shields are then used to protect the demonstration 
from police violence (a tactic that conveniently upsets the violence/nonviolence dichotomy) and 
to convey the essential message of the protest: to stop education cuts. This tactic first appeared 
in Rome during student protests on November 23, 2010. By December 9, just over two weeks 
later, students in London used a book bloc at their aforementioned protests. In 2011, book blocs 
appeared in Umea, Sweden, Oakland, California and Madrid, Spain (Libcom.org 2012). Direct 
actions such as these that employ tactics which are easily reproducible and enable others to 
expand their capacity for collective power have significant democratic potential. 
The final three points I would like to make are somewhat different in that they address 
the fact that direct actions do not just affect the power-holders and the challengers, but also 
fellow citizens. Democratic direct action should appreciate this fact and engage with fellows in 
several ways. 
Democratic direct actions should avoid disruptive actions that target or disproportionaly 
burden “power peers” or “power lessers.” 
Disruptive actions have democratic potential when 
they challenge or upset power relations. They are, in most circumstances, not a democratic way 
of engaging with people who are in a similar or lower position on society’s power hierarchy. As 
was suggested earlier in the chapter, disruption is a democratically appropriate tactic in the 
context of inequality – it can be a democratic response to conditions of domination, oppression 
or marginalization. It is not a democratic way of engaging with people who are not in a relative 
position of structural power. 

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Democratic direct actions should take seriously the disruptive effects of their actions on 
their “power peers” and “power lessers”, strive to minimize these effects, where possible, and 
be able to justify these effects, where it is not possible to minimize them
. Keeping in mind that 
the democratic disruptions target those in positions of power, practitioners of direct action should 
seek to avoid disruption to fellow citizens. If direct actions are able to shut down a corporate 
meeting or stop the transportation of capital is the goal by focusing blockades in a relatively 
narrow area, this is democratically preferable to using blockades to impede a much wider area.
Often, this may not be the case and consequences to fellow citizens are unavoidable. In such 
circumstances, democratic direct actions should engage fellow citizens with respect. While 
confrontation with authorities may be acceptable, participants should strive to avoid 
confrontation with fellows. While direct action is often a response to a failure of communication 
with power-holders, participants can and should still try to communicate with fellow citizens. If 
a blockade is shutting down a highway, participants can still try to explain and justify these 
disruptions to motorists. Before a large demonstration, for example, people can go door-to-door 
in neighborhoods that are likely to be affected and explain the likely disruptions and the reasons 
for those disruptions to residents. During an action, participants can work to communicate with 
fellows through banners or fliers that explain the purpose of the disruption. To give a personal 
example, I was part of a group that organized a large bike ride through the streets of Boulder to a 
coal plant east of town. On the way to the coal plant, the group of several hundred took up all 
three lanes of eastbound traffic on a major road. Because such a move undoubtedly delayed 
many people who were not the targets of the action, we displayed a large banner at the back of 
the bike ride, explaining to people how far we would be traveling on the road and recommending 
a specific detour to get around us. While by no means a perfect solution, this at least suggests 

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how disruptive direct actions can be carried out in ways that are at least cognizant of the effects 
such actions have on fellow citizens. 
Especially where the disruptive effects on “power peers” or “lessers” is significant, 
democratic direct actions should avoid actions whose disruptive effects outlast the action itself.
Direct action actions can have irreversible outcomes, some of which are not likely to be foreseen 
by participants. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does require consideration. I suggest 
that the effects of direct actions are more democratic if they are sustained by ongoing enactments 
of collective power, rather than being the residual effect of a past enactment of collective power.
For example, human blockades of bridges are more democratic than blowing up bridges because 
the bridge closure lasts only so long as people are willing and able to make it so. These kinds of 
direct actions cannot survive without appealing ethical commitments, sustained organization, and 
significant popular participation and support.
This self-limiting characteristic of direct action, often viewed as its major weakness, is in 
fact a strength from the democratic perspective I advance: it makes it possible for people to 
regularly participate in politics in robust ways (through actions that disrupt and/or prefigure), 
without the result of such actions collapsing into new forms of centralization, hierarchy and 
authoritarianism. In the next chapter, I explore the way these types of action reorient our view of 
democracy away from the task of legitimating power, to the task of dispersing power, and 
present networked organization as one practice or mechanism for fostering this dispersal.