Anyone quick to condemn the antics of radicals needs a history lesson and logical consistency check. Especially amid the current hysteria over war and terrorism, it is easy to forget that the United States won its independence not only by war with England, but also through acts of nonviolent civl disobedience, including property destruction. As dramatically evident in the Boston Tea Party, when in 1773 fifty members of the underground Sons of Liberty group dumped 342 chests of British tea into the Boston Harbor to protest the high tax on tea and the British tyranny in general, the colonies employed sabotage tactics to undermine the power of the british and to galvanize the will of the newly emerging nation. Of this form of “terrorism”, John Adams said, “There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this last effort of the patriots, that I greatly admire.”
Not merely an act of senseless demolition, property destruction was and still is a legitimate cry for justice and a powerful means of achieving it. Civil disobedience and sabotage have been key catalysts for many modern radical struggles. As James Goodman succinctly puts it.
“The entire edifice of western liberal democracy - from democratic rights, to representative parliament, to freedom of speech - rests on previous acts of civil disobedience. The American anti-colonialists in the 1770s asserting “no taxation without representation”; the French revolutionaries in the 1780s demanding “liberty, equality, fraternity”; the English Chartists in the 1830s demanding a “People’s Charter”; the Suffragetts of the 1900s demanding “votes for women”; the Gandhian disobedience movement from the 1920s calling for “Swaraj’Vself-government; all of these were movements of civil disobedience, and have shaped the political traditions that we live with today.”
Few things are more American and patriotic than dissent, protest, civil disobedience, and property destruction in the name of freedom and liberation. From the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, from the Suffragettes to the Civil Rights Movement; From Vietnam War resistance and the Battle of Seattle, to the current Occupy Wall Street and NATO Summit protests, key struggles in US history employed illegal direct action tactics - and sometimes violence- to advance the historical movement toward human rights and freedoms. Rather than being a rupture in some bucolic tradition of Natural Law guiding the Reason of modern citizens to the Good and bringing Justice down to earth in a peaceful and gradual dazzle, the current movements needs to be the continuation of the American culture of rights, democracy, civil disobedience, and direct action, as they expand the struggle to a far broader constituency.
American history has two main political traditions. First, there is the ‘indirect” system of “representative democracy” whereby citizens express their needs and wants to elected local and state officials whose sole function is to “represent” them in the political and legal system. The system’s “output” - laws- reflects the “input” - the people’s will and interests. This cartoon image of liberal democracy, faithfully reproduced in generation after generation of textbooks and in the discourse of state apologists and the media, is falsified by the fact that powerful economic and political forces co-opt elected officials, who represent the interests of the elite instead of the majority. From the realization that the sate is hardly s neutral arbiter of competing interests but rather exist to advance the interests of economic and political elites, a second political tradition of direct action has emerged.
Direct action advocates argue that the indirect system of representative democracy is irredeemably corrupted by the money, power, cronyism, and privilege. Appealing to the lessons of history, direct activists insist that one cannot win struggles solely through education, moral persuasion, political campaigns, demonstrations, or any form of aboveground, mainstream, or legal action. Direct action movements therefore bypass pre-approved efforts to social power they challenge. Whereas indirect action can promote passivity and dependence on others for change, direct action tends to be more involving and empowering. In the words of Voltairine de Cleyre, “the evil of pinning faith to indirect action is far greater than any such minor results. The main evil is that it destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious spirit, teaches people to rely on someone else to do for them what they should do for themselves; finally renders organic the anomalous idea that by massing supineness together until a majority is acquired, then through the peculiar magic of that majority, this supineness is to be transformed into energy. That is, people who have lost the habit of striking for themselves as individuals, who have submitted to every injustice while waiting for the majority to grow, are going to become metamorphosed into human high-explosives by a mere process of packing! People must learn that their power does not lie in their voting strength, that their power lies in their ability to stop production.”
Direct action attics can vary widely, raging from sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, tree sits to hacking Websites, email and phone harassment, home demonstrations, and arson, as well as bombings and murder. Direct action can be legal, as in the case of the civil disobedience tactics of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Illegal direct action, moreover, can be nonviolent or violent, and can respect private property or destroy it.
Opponents of direct action often argue that illegal actions undermine the rule of the law. and they view civil disobedience as a threat to political order. Among other things, this perspective presupposes that the system in question is legitimate or cannot be improved. It misrepresents direct activists as people who lack respect for the principles of law and its relation to ethics and justice than those who fetishize political order for its own sake. Moreover, this argument fails to grasp that many direct action advocates are anarchists who seek to replace the states and legal systems they hold in contempt with the ethical substance of self-regulating decentralized communities. Whatever their approach, champions of direct action renounce uncritical allegiance to a legal system. To paraphrase Karl Marx, the law is the opiate of the people, and the blind obedience to laws and social decorum led German Jews to their death with little resistance. All too often, the legal system simply a byzantine structure designed to absorb opposition and induce paralysis by deferral, delay, and dilution.
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