direct action

• Audio (US)

  (file)

direct action (usually uncountable, plural direct actions)

1. A form of political activism in which participants act directly, ignoring established political procedures. It may take the form of strikes, workplace occupations, sabotage, sit-ins, squatting, revolutionary/guerrilla warfare, demonstrations, vandalism or graffiti.
   • 1912, Voltairine de Cleyre, Direct Action:

     Or there are those who believe that in general the wisest way for people to get what they want is by the indirect method of voting into power some one who will make what they want legal; yet who all the same will occasionally under exceptional conditions advise a strike; and a strike, as I have said, is direct action.

   • 2009, David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography, AK Press, →ISBN, page 203:

     It should be easy enough to see why anarchists have always been drawn to direct action.

2. (military) Small-scale raids, ambushes, sabotage, etc. carried out by the military.

• direct actionist
• direct activist