Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

This is a handbook for direct action. It's not the only one?there are thousands: every gardener's guide is a direct action handbook, as is every cookbook. Any action that sidesteps regulations, representatives, and authorities to accomplish goals directly is direct action. In a society in which political power, economic capital, and social control are centralized in the hands of an elite, certain forms of direct action are discouraged, to say the least; this book is about those in particular, for anyone who wants to take control of her life and accept responsibility for her part in determining the fate of humanity.

For the civilian bom in captivity and raised on spectatorship and submission, direct action changes everything. The morning she arises to put a plan into motion, she awakens under a different sun?if she has been able to sleep at all, that is?and in a different body, attuned to every detail of the world around her and possessed of the power to change it. She finds her companions endowed with tremendous courage and resourcefulness, equal to monumental challenges and worthy of passionate love. Together, they enter a foreign land where outcomes are uncertain but anything is possible and every minute counts.

Direct Action versus Representation

Practicing direct action means acting directly to meet needs, rather than relying on representatives or choosing from prescribed options. Today tiie term is commonly applied to the use of illegal protest tactics to pressure governments and corporations to make certain decisions, which at bottom is not much different from voting or making campaign contributions; but it most properly describes actions that cut out the middleman entirely to solve problems without mediation.

Need some examples? You can give money to a charity organization, or you can start your own chapter of Food Not Bombs and feed yourself and other hungry people at once. You can write an angry letter to the editor of a magazine that doesn't provide good coverage of the subjects you consider important, or you can start your own magazine.

You can vote for a mayor who promises to start a new program to help the homeless or you can squat unused buildings and open them up as free housing for anyone in need. You can write your Congressman, asking him to oppose a law that would allow corporations to cut down old-growth forests-but if they still pass that law, you can go to the forests and stop the cutting by sitting in trees, blockading roads, and monkey-wrenching machinery.

The opposite of direct action is representation. There are many Hnds of representation-words are used to represent ideas and experiences, the viewers of a soap opera let their own hopes and fears be represented by those of the protagonists, the pope claims to represent God-but the most well-known example today can be found in the electoral system. In this society, we're encouraged to think of voting as our primary means of exercising power and participating sociaUy. Yet whether one votes with a ballot for a politician's representation, with doUars for a corporate product, or with one's wardrobe for a youth culhire, voting is an act of deferral, in which the voter picks a person or system or concept to represent her interests. This is an unreliable way to exercise power to say the least.

Let's compare voting with direct action, to bring out the differences between medi-

ated and unmediated activity in general. Voting is a lottery: if a candidate doesn't get elected, then the energy his constituency put into supporting him is wasted as the power they were hoping he would exercise for them goes to someone else. With direct action, one can be certain that one's work will offer results. In marked contrast to every kmd of petitioning, direct action secures resources-experience, contacts in the community, the grudging respect of adversaries?that others can never take away.

Voting consolidates the power of a whole society in the hands of a few individuals-through sheer force of habit, not to speak of other methods of enforcement, everyone else IS kept in a position of dependence. In direct action, people utilize their own re- 7"^'"

Preface

sources and capabilities, discovering in the process what these are and how much they can accomplish.