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

participate in the blockade…Affinity groups were organized into clusters. The 
area around the Convention Center was broken down into thirteen sections, and 
affinity groups and clusters were committed to hold particular sections…No 
centralized leader could have coordinated the scene in the midst of the chaos, and 
none was needed – the organic, autonomous organization we had proved far more 
powerful and effective. 
As a result, thousands of people were able to utilize a model of decision-making that not 
only proved effective at disrupting the WTO meeting, but also prefigured the type of 
organization of society many of the protesters envisioned as replacing the hierarchical system of 
global capitalism. For Graeber (2004, 84):
When protesters in Seattle chanted ‘this is what democracy looks like,” they 
meant to be taken literally. In the best tradition of direct action, they not only 
confronted a certain form of power, exposing its mechanisms and attempting to 
literally stop it in its tracks: they did it in a way which demonstrated why the kind 
of social relations on which it is based were unnecessary…[T]he decentralized 
form of organization…
was
the movement’s ideology. 
For Carter (2005, xi) this relationship between disruptive and prefigurative direct action applies 
more generally:
Direct action is usually a response to some kind of democratic deficit and a sense 
of powerlessness…But direct action is at the same time a form of democratic 
empowerment. Direct action movements tend to generate their own ideas and 
practices of democracy, both in planning resistance and in creating alternative 
institutions as part of this resistance, so promoting forms of direct democracy. 
Insofar as direct action is practiced as a form of self-directed disruption of power, it also 
tends to foster opportunities for the prefigurative and creative side of direct action, as well.
Indeed, the best examples of direct action combine both the disruptive and prefigurative 
dimensions. However, I think it is useful to maintain an analytical distinction between them, for 
two reasons. The first is a practical matter: activists will often employ the term direct action, 
even if only one dimension of direct action is present. The second reason is more theoretical: 
these two dimensions of direct action present unique challenges to democratic theory, require a 

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different set of arguments and theoretical engagements, and as such, are usefully thought about 
separately (even though they often appear simultaneously in practice). In general, I propose that 
we think about direct action as the enactment of collective power, outside of official processes 
and unauthorized by formal authorities, in ways that aim to model a political imaginary. 
Resisting the Move to Make Direct Action “Safe”
Having provided a general account of direct action as it has developed, largely within the 
anarchist tradition, I want to briefly note and critique a move by April Carter in her (2005) 
Direct 
Action and Democracy Today
. Carter approaches the concept of direct action from outside of the 
anarchist tradition and attempts to conceptualize direct action in order to make the concept safer 
for liberal democracy. For example, she explicitly defines direct action as “essentially 
nonviolent methods of noncooperation, obstruction or defiance” (
ibid
. 1), thus problematically 
writing out the possibility that direct action could involve “violence.” First, in defining direct 
action as “essentially nonviolent,” Carter tightly links the question of direct action to the 
violence/nonviolence dichotomy. Readers may have noticed that I have avoided building 
(non)violence into my discussion of direct action. The reason for this is straight-forward: the 
practice of direct action, as a concept, is agnostic toward the question of violence – that is, it 
neither requires, nor condemns violence