One of the core beliefs of Anarchists is the idea of direct action. They believe voting for candidates picked by elite power groups is no choice at all; coercive submission by laws and policies passed by the dominant elite is considered tyranny. Non-cooperation, sabotage, civil disobedience, general strikes are considered "direct action" and are the weapons of choice to bring about change.
This belief in direct action is often used to portray anarchists as a violent fringe group. Anarchists attacking police lines at World Trade Organization meetings and recently in Greece are portrayed by the media as anarchists who desire chaos. The real aim is the replacement of governing power groups by direct participatory democracy.
The real danger to the established system is not the rock throwers in the street, it is what is generally not reported or downplayed in the mainstream press. The general strikes in Egypt, Greece, Ireland and Great Britain that brought their economies to a grinding halt. Then there are the attacks on websites, the raiding and dumping of documents revealing government and corporate secrets. Those are acts of anarchism at its most effective, the refusal to participate in ones own bondage or suppression of another.
Anarchists are against violence and war in general but recognize the necessity of self defense. War is seen as the use of the poor of one country against the poor of another country for the benefit of the elites of both countries. Some Anarchists feel violence is justified in light of the real life murder and destruction of individuals, cultures, societies, and family systems by corporations and governments that goes on every day without consequence to the actors involved, they have a point. Economic exploitation and military devastation produce predictable mortality on a population and some Anarchists consider this justification for actions of self defense.
But violence is only a minute part of the Anarchist's arsenal, it more often takes the role of non-cooperation, flaunting authority, or violating the rules just because they can as a way of demonstrating the limitations of power. The tagger and graffiti artists are anarchists protesting their invisibility in a system that denies them an identity or voice; although it's doubtful they would put it in those terms. Anarchism is the result of an individual decision to take action against the system when all other choices seem ineffective. The responses range through history from Ghandi, who mastered leading cooperative non-violent anarchistic responses to violent individual actions like Leon Czolgosz who assassinated President William McKinley.
One of the chief tactics is sabotage a corporation or government considered a legitimate target by denying them means to make a profit or function. Because government, capitalist or religious authority always requires the cooperation of its victims to work, non-cooperation is a strategy that can be done by virtually anyone. Levels of nonparticipation can range from what and where you buy your groceries to a refusal to pay taxes, the stand taken by Thoreau. Many times anarchists demonstrate a sense of humor, at their victim's expense. As community organizer Saul Alinski said, "There is no defense against ridicule."
On the simplest level it is the daily acts that deny power to any targeted entity, on its greatest level it has the power to shut down any government, any company or any religion. It can take the form of individual acts of civil disobedience such as refusing to complete census information, to people who save and share seeds in defiance of patents created by huge agribusiness, to pot growers who support the illegal economy and hactivists who shut down websites of their targets preventing them from doing business. On the larger level it is the sabotage by groups such as Earth First, fighters at WTO meetings, Green Peace actions and of course the people of the Arab Spring in the Mid East from Tunisia to Syria.
Marx, the Wobblies and Anonymous are all right. The only thing workers have to lose is their chains. The blatant acts of bailing out investors and banks while denying public welfare services to the poorest, demanding pension and healthcare givebacks and raising taxes on workers while forcing fire sales of state resources represents one of the greatest thefts in history and certainly represents.
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