Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Voting forces everyone in a movement to try to agree on one platform: coalitions fight over what compromises to make, each faction insisting that its way is the best and that the others are messing everything up by not going along with its program. A lot of energy gets wasted in these disputes and recriminations. In direct action, no vast consensus is necessary: different groups apply different tactics according to what they beUeve in and feel comfortable doing, with an eye to complementing one another's efforts. People involved in different direct actions have no need to squabble, unless they really are seeking conflicting goals, or years of voting have taught them to fight with anyone who doesn't think exactiy as they do.

Conflicts over voting often distract from the real issues at hand, as people get caught up in the drama of one party against another, one candidate against another, one agenda against another. With direct action, the issues themselves are raised, addressed specifically, and often resolved.

Voting is only possible when election time comes around. Direct action can be applied whenever one sees fit. Voting is only usefiil for addressing topics that are currently on the political agendas of candidates, while direct action can be applied in every aspect of your life, in every part of the world you live in. Direct action is a more efficient use of resources than voting, campaigning, or canvassing; an individual can accomplish with one dollar a goal that would cost a collective ten dollars, a non-governmental organization a hundred dollars, a corporation a thousand dollars, and the State Department ten thousand dollars.

Voting is glorified as a manifestation of our supposed freedom. It's not freedom? freedom is getting to decide what the choices are in the first place, not picking between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Direct action is the real thing. You make the plan, you create the

14 options, the sky's the limit.

Ultimately, there's no reason the strategies of voting and direct action can't both be applied together. One does not cancel the other out. The problem is that so many people think of voting as their primary way of exerting political and social power that a disproportionate amount of time and energy is focused on electoral affairs while other opportunities to make change go to waste. For months and months preceding every election, everyone argues about the voting issue, what candidates to vote for or whether to vote at all, when voting itself takes less than an hour. Vote or don't, but get on with it! Remember all the other ways you can make your voice heard. This book is for people who are ready to get some more practice using them.

Direct action need not be popular to be effective. The point of a direct action is the action Itself, not pandering to supposed public opinion or anticipated media coverage. Those raised in Democracy Monoculture on the assumption that voting is the alpha and omega of social participation often presume that the only possible purpose of any political activity is to convert others to a position in order to build a constituency; consequently they fail to recognize the broad diversity of roles direct action can serve. These are the people who are always quick to pontificate about how graffiti hurts the public image of "the" movement, or how individual artistic projects are irrelevant to the needs of "the" people. But helping "convert the masses" is only one of many roles a direct action can play Let's go over some of the others.

Direct action may simply solve an individual problem: a household needs to eat, so food is grown, dumpstered, or stolen; an advertisement is offensive, so it is torn down or adjusted; a circle of friends wants to learn more about Latin American literature, so a reading group is established. Direct action can be a means for a small group to contribute to a community: people need to know that a rapist has been active in the neighborhood, so fliers are made and posted; police are out of hand, so a cop-watching program

... And What It's Good Far

Preface 15

is initiated. Direct action can be an opportunity for small groups to get used to working together in larger networks: the slumlord won't fix anyone's apartment, so a tenants' union forms to organize a rent strike.