While direct action is commonly associated with tactics that involve resistance against constituted powers -- such as property destruction or impeding the flow of goods, information, and capital -- it is also an extremely important positive mode of radical social change. Indeed, we would argue that it is the most important and effective mode, since liberal reform perpetuates all of the forms of domination and exploitation associated with the system of states, and even the most authentic Marxist revolution against capitalism necessarily perpetuates state domination and does not address other axes of oppression in their specificity. Direct action to create alternatives is based on the understanding that while using one mode of domination (usually the state form) to eliminate or lessen the effects of another (e.g capitalism, racism, heterosexism) may sometimes have progressive local effects, it achieves these effects only at the cost of perpetuating domination as such.
The standard counter-argument to this position is that it leads to elitism/relativism,
abandoning those who are most vulnerable among us to their fate. However, as
the many experiments collected here show, there are ways of addressing systematic
oppression without reproducing systematic oppression in the process. This is
perhaps the key insight, the key goal, of a non-hegemonic politics of affinity:
as Gustav Landauer said, the state (and
capitalism/racism/ableism/heterosexism…) is a state of relations; we change
it by constructing other kinds of relations. These must include, of course,
real solidarity across differences,
to replace the false solidarity created through interacting with each other
via the state form (through policies and programs such as ‘affirmative
action’, ‘multiculturalism’, etc.)