Integrating direct action and existing political structures, brief notes

I was talking with a friend of mine earlier in a coffeeshop. Outside the coffeeshop in fact, while he smoked, cars drove by lazily and a little recklessly, and the shop played Charlie Parker lightly overhead.

We started talking about direct action in relation to a book coming out from a very interesting anarchist anthropologist named Graeber.

I'm not going to talk about him though, I'm about to pass out for the night and I just wanted to record something sort of peculiar.

It seems that the most effective radical political actions have a major component of direct action that is then legitimized by the existing power structure to some degree. That this is the means of actually "moving" things.

Examples. In Argentina currently, there are hundreds of factories that were taken over by their workers in the last economic collapse. The owners shuttered the doors and fled to more lucrative climes. The workers decided to just take the damn things over and start working. They have since gotten the government to legitimate their takeovers in many cases, through the standard tools of liberal activism- meeting with and arguing before legislators, seeking legal help, etc. But the initial step was definitely beyond the normal bounds of political action.

The Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil operates in a similar way. It is one of the largest social movements on earth and I believe the largest popular social movement in the Western Hemisphere. Their chief tactic is land seizure. They invade the property of a plantation owner en masse, build a community, defend that community from the landowner's goons and paramilitaries, and petition the government to legitimate the seizure. And it works to a pretty significant degree.

Finally, unions used to operate in this way until they were integrated into the law. Workers would strike, enforce that strike by force, and try to make the owners and powers-that-be accept the new terms they were dictating. The most famous example from the Depression era was the great Sit-Down Strike at Flint, Michigan. There autoworkers occupied their own factory, eventually forcing the GM to recognize and bargain with the union. This was one of the most powerful and inspirational events in American labor history.

And it has this same quality, that of a direct action taken in abeyance of the legally sanctioned norms, then legitimated by the power system. I think Walter Benjamin said something about this in his famous essay on violence, when he contrasted law-destroying with law-creating violence. The violence of the organized strike, which was (prior to integration and state protection in labor law) a direct assault on property constituted a form of law-creating violence.

Anyway, it's very interesting. I wonder what application this has to contemporary America, if any...

Caveat: It does seem from the examples I mentioned though that the efficacy of direct action as law-creating violence is bound to a supportive milieu, that is itself fairly uncontrollable. Strikes of the general intensity at Flint had been occurring for decades, yet in the height of the Depression it made the hearts of the public burst into flame. In Argentina the economic collapse and general climate of social insurrection allowed the recuperados to come into being. And the MST is wildly popular in Brazil- MST activists have been characters in soap operas and their influence in national politics is considerable. So it seems that the action is itself reciprocally conditioned and enabled by the milieu that draws it into being. Or maybe it is better to say that groups and actors create arrays of actions, patterns of tactics to change the world, and that the socius "selects" which patterns are preferred. The same public that might have condemned a strike in normal economic times was emboldened by it in chaotic times.

In the US right now I'd have to say that the most compelling aspect of the social milieu is the tremendous expansion of informal, voluntary labor for cultural, emotional and social production. People's activities are outpacing the ability of the market or any traditional power-holder (the nuclear family, the state, schools, churches) to integrate them. There's something very interesting going on...