Recently, UK group Just Stop Oil was reported to have been “policed out of existence”. Key activists planning an event on Zoom were given five year jail sentences and now the group is holding one final protest to see the project out. As state repression and anti-protest laws escalate in our context, could this be the fate of direct action groups here as well?
Whether you disagree with their methods or not, the strategy Just Stop Oil pursued sought both the mass participation and economic disruptions necessary to fight climate destroying industries, but we often see that modern movements are forced to choose one or the other. Either we have economic disruptions executed by groups too small, underground and incurring too much risk to attract the mass participation needed to win, or we have mass participation in protest movements that cause none of the economic disruptions needed to win. This phenomenon has been noted in a study called ‘The Activist’s Dilemma’ (2020) that analysed public reactions to tactics used within social movements, both left and right wing. So how did the left end up here, and is there a way out?
While the left today barely glances at the union movement to support their campaigns, unions were once the muscle of major social movements. Militant unionists long ago figured out how to mobilise masses of workers to cause large-scale economic disruptions for social change. They were able to take action that freed their comrades from prison sentences, re-instated them in jobs they were fired from due to organising, and even ensured that the laws intending to repress their organising efforts were rendered unusable by the state. These lessons suggest a path forward for a left littered with dead ends.
Failing upwards
Where militant unions took high stakes action when adequate power to win had been built, the modern left instead takes high stakes action as part of the process of building the power to eventually win. Risky direct action is justified as a tool of propaganda to recruit. In ‘Direct Action’, Harald Beyer-Arnesen states that “acts of immediate empowerment tend to be contagious as they practically illustrate roads that may be traveled outside the realm of bureaucratic intermediaries and parliamentary representation”. Blockade Australia states that it uses direct action not just to win, but to “build grassroots power”. For sub.media “well-timed and well-executed direct actions can offer an escape from the endless cycle of representational politics”.
Though some may believe that direct action transmits complex political ideas to onlookers, the most credible explanation seems to be that direct action functions as propaganda by providing an empowering political outlet, relative to the lethargy of electoralism, for people who already have a level of political consciousness and existing agreement with the social issues being addressed. This basic idea is associated with the insurrectionists in the 19th century, who were made infamous for bombing bourgeois cafes and assassinating heads of state — they sought to spread their ideas through action they called “propaganda of the deed”, rather than through ideas alone.
In our context, as new atrocities overlap with existing ones, the broader left’s ability to build power that can win is subsumed by a widely held obligation to take action that can’t win. Though it hopes to eventually win, for all the arrests, fines and jail terms of activists, the left seems closer to an end to protest rights than an end to ties with Israel or fossil fuel production.
Does propaganda of the deed work?
For groups like Extinction Rebellion, they use pacifism and respectability to attempt to propagandise to ‘average people’ that protest is for everyone, not just the existing left. The pacifism goes as far as aiming to be arrested, in order to fill prison cells in such numbers the state has to let them go, and hopefully not build new prisons, or overcrowd existing prisons to house them. This approach subscribes to political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s theory that if 3.5% of the population engage in civil disobedience, then movements have a fighting chance of winning. Though Chenoweth doesn’t clarify which population groups are most effective, further research has clarified that “…movements dominated by industrial workers outperform all other protest campaigns in bringing about democracy”.
Different propaganda is attempted through riots, vandalism and property destruction. In an article titled ‘You are not the target audience‘, William Gillis asks, “What’s more valuable, avoiding a few million people briefly tut-tutting at the ‘violent protesters’ before promptly forgetting us or shattering the worldviews of hundreds and gaining fifty new full-time activists brimming with passion?” The titular target audience here seems to be an idealised ‘oppressed person’ and any morally advanced allies. People already frustrated with the system and viewing these tactics as warranted and effective. This orientation either assumes that small groups of daring radicals can achieve social change, or that eventually society will become so inhospitable that masses of people will come to justify and adopt their tactics.
Though their actions intend to communicate different things to different people, all who have practiced ‘propaganda of the deed’ since the 19th century have attempted to “provoke the State to become escalatingly repressive in its response”. Gillis says “There’s no equivocating to be had when the state responds to broken windows by breaking skulls — getting hurt shows what side people should be on”.
Contrary to these beliefs, the ‘Activist’s Dilemma’ study demonstrates that “protesters who undertook extreme actions [like vandalism, physical violence, property destruction, or blocking highways…] were perceived to be more immoral, and participants reported lower levels of emotional connection and social identification with these “extreme” protesters”. Worse, these “extreme protest actions not only negatively affected attitudes toward the movement, but typically also reduced support for the movements’ central positions”. The study also surveyed activists willing to engage in so-called ‘extreme protest actions’ who saw their actions as “more likely to increase than decrease popular support”. Another study called ‘The false consensus effect’ published in 1985 by Mullen et al. notes that this might be explained because “individuals, especially those with strong beliefs, often overestimate how similar others’ beliefs and perspectives will be to their own”.
If these studies are anything to go by, it seems it is unwise to rely on the public developing an affinity with protestors engaging in vandalism or property destruction as a tool to grow your movement. Neither is it wise to rely on the allure of pacifism when it involves anything other than completely non-disruptive protest, which ‘the Activist’s Dilemma’ study also admits doesn’t really change things.
It’s the State’s game to win
The assumption at the heart of this strategy is that activists can demonstrate the potential of their strategies even when those strategies are met with heavy police repression and not victory. As Gillis says, it’s not that “a few busted windows or bruised cops pave the road to a better world, but because it at least demonstrates potential”. To its detriment, this is a complete inversion of the logic of class struggle.
Two workers in a big factory would never go on strike just to show other workers the potential of striking, because in getting fired and having the company squash future organising efforts they would have demonstrated the limitations of their strategy rather than its potential. In this case bosses would just need to punish workers to an extent that eclipses their moral justifications for taking action. States do the same thing when they jail activists in Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion or Blockade Australia. How much of the movement can the state deter with months-long jail terms? How about half a decade? Since there is no organised opposition powerful enough to fight this repression, nor sufficient public support for activists that systematically block civilian traffic, it’s the state’s game to win. This is why the power to win is more important than the obligation to act.
For workplace organisers, a win is what demonstrates the merit of the strike. The strike doesn’t demonstrate its own merit, especially if it results in harm to workers. A strike is only an effective tactic if adequate power flows through it to win, and that requires a ‘critical mass’ of workers prepared to act together. All other direct action is the same. These tactics are channels for power, and must not be conflated with holding any intrinsic power or merit divorced from their ability to achieve clear outcomes. There can be no ‘good’ tactics, only tactics that are effective or ineffective at realising particular strategic goals.
Blockade Australia states that they use “…disruptive action to force the urgent broad-scale change necessary for survival”. Extinction Rebellion states that “…disruption cannot be ignored and creates political leverage that is needed to make real change”. These kinds of absolute statements are extremely common among advocates of this kind of direct action. At every turn, direct action is conflated with power. Perhaps as a matter of running propaganda to encourage people to join in. It wouldn’t be so rousing to say that direct action might eventually work when enough sacrifices have been made.
The dangers of assuming risk
If high levels of risk is an assumed part of struggle then activists must be taught that sacrifice is important, fullstop. Taking on risk is how we show we care about a social issue. Sometimes it’s a matter of ‘giving up privilege’. The article ‘Accomplices Not Allies’ argues that “Direct action is really the best and may be the only way to learn what it is to be an accomplice. We’re in a fight, so be ready for confrontation and consequence”. For Gillis, it seems taking risks demonstrates a kind of selflessness intended to inspire: “Political vandalism is potent in part precisely because it risks so much for no personal gain.” While activists believe they must risk something to eventually win, cultures where sacrifice and risk are encouraged and celebrated inevitably follow. Whether it be the appraisal of those willing to take risks for justice, like Disrupt Land Forces celebrating that “thousands had risked arrest and cop violence to protest the recent weapons expo in Melbourne”. Or the profiles of arrested activists enshrined on campaign websites alongside their jail terms and personal encouragements.
If losing is a necessary part of eventually winning, then activists are also incentivised to reframe success. Giving certain actions the optics of a win is an important part of recruitment. Like Just Stop Oil, it could be how many barrels of oil have been delayed from being transported, or like Blockade Australia, how many hours of disruption actions have caused, or even more nebulous metrics like media attention. Though Disrupt Land Forces were unable to shut down the weapons expo, one of their successes noted was “costing the war mongers heaps in daily CBD parking fees, and exposing them to our voices as they walked to the expo”.
As a matter of propaganda, the disruption goes from being a means to a win, to the win itself. Without ending the expo, Disrupt Land Forces states that it “achieved its tactical goal of disrupting the arms fair”. Such disruptions of small events are the ultimate salve for a powerless left. Though the structures of imperialism and genocide still stand, shutting down a weapons expo is as concrete a ‘win’ as the left can hope for in the modern day.
Though a select few people may be swayed to take action upon witnessing it, watching these movements remain fringe demonstrates that many people aren’t interpreting these actions the way that these radicals would like. In fact, one might think activists are effectively running counter-propaganda campaigns against their own strategies by advertising up to 3-month long jail sentences for activists on the same websites where they seek new activists to train. Journalist Justin Rowlatt suggests that despite widespread public concern about the future of the planet, much of the public ended up hostile to Just Stop Oil. Many called for protestors to be ran over or bashed by cops. One lorry driver went viral actually running over protestors in Germany.
Above criticism
The downstream effect of assigning value to a strategy divorced from its power or outcomes, is that it becomes beyond reproach. If a strategy is essentially effective, but people aren’t flocking to join in, the fault must lie with a disinterested, less radical or perhaps uncaring public. This creates a sense of bitterness toward the uninitiated. Where Italian Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti took blame for the left failing to win workers away from Mussolini’s fascism, the new left has set itself up so that really only the working class is left to blame. Activists continue to make their sacrifices, waiting for enough people to wise up and give their strategy the power to win.
If their chosen strategy is intrinsically radical, then criticism of this strategy is assumed to be the product of political conservatism or unacknowledged liberal cowardice. Therefore, it’s hard to compute that getting a criminal record executing tactics that have no chance of winning is ‘needless’ or ‘performative’ risk-taking. It can’t be performative because it involves direct action. It’s not like they put a filter on their profile picture… They put their bodies on the line. For those of us that believe that constantly losing and being arrested actually detracts from eventually winning, there is no justification for subjecting activists to the risks demanded by this approach to struggle.
A common sarcastic response is to invite critics to attend organising meetings to raise their criticisms, reinforcing that their mode of organising is self-evidently correct enough that others must just be armchair theorists or wrong for not joining in. Their response to criticism isolates them further, which reaffirms the importance of their role and sacrifice for social change. They are the only ones that get it, therefore their activism is sacred and must be not be dissuaded. As Carl Eugene Stroud puts it in ‘Tactical Formalism’, “critiques of tactics are wrongfully interpreted as ideological threats”. In this way, criticism from the ‘so-called’ left can only be viewed as a betrayal and capitulation to the right.
To be clear, most protest is fine for most people at any time. It’s when risk is present that the question of what justifies the risk arises, and if it doesn’t bring us closer to social change then what other justifications could possibly suffice? We also have no moral qualms with property destruction, riots or vandalism, we just take issue with their application as a mainstay of revolutionary strategy. We agree with the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (MACG) when they wrote about groups like Blockade Australia: “[it] isn’t that their disruptive tactics go too far. Instead, we think they don’t cause anywhere near enough disruption”.
Strategic dead ends
After their intense repression, Just Stop Oil has admitted in their reflections that “they will undertake disruptive actions but won’t stick around to be arrested any more”. It seems they intend to take the movement underground, toward insular, trusted networks of activists engaging in clandestine actions. But as Dr Graeme Hayes argues, “a tiny minority of climate campaigners are likely to get involved in such actions”.
Some ex-Just Stop Oil activists that have moved on to more underground direct action state that “it’s impossible for people to sustain an effective campaign with people going to prison for years after a single action. Activists are forced into a position where we have to go underground”.
The ultra-left are likely vindicated by this development as many critiques have been directed at these activists strange penchant for being arrested. But this turn doesn’t lead to revelatory powers being unlocked, just to more extreme tactics being employed by fewer activists divorced from the masses, less able to recruit or control their own narrative. As MACG said, “a network of small secretive affinity groups can only cause minor and sporadic interruptions to the corporations destroying the planet”.
The failure of Just Stop Oil demonstrates the limitations of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ strategy. Through experiencing the folly of moral appeals to the general public and the farce that is peaceful protest, they have proven an important point for us — that it is through taking action, not witnessing action, that we are transformed.
Class struggle transforms consciousness
The strategy of direct actionists is one of moralism. It requires a person to have a level of political consciousness, a willingness and ability to sacrifice comfort and even safety, and an agreement with the tactics on the table in the first place, all before they hit the streets.
The strategy of building class power demands far less of individuals. Workers don’t have to break their own moral code, and on our continent don’t have to sacrifice their safety or risk incarceration to join a union. They’re incentivised to join because unions are a means to more stable and better paid work. In a good union ecosystem even the most self-interested worker learns that it is only through cooperation with other workers that they can have their material interests met. The individualism and competition rewarded in broader society must be replaced with the principle of solidarity and collective action or no one wins. Through taking action that definitively wins demands, workers can realise the potentialities of their power. The task of revolutionaries, then as it should be today, was to push workers and unions toward greater solidarity with broader struggles and ultimately the end of capitalism.
Property destruction is not social transformation
Though small, underground groups of radicals can disable a pipeline or set fire to a police station, they can’t blow up the underlying social relationship — the logic of Capitalism is fire retardant. Police stations have been burned down and more resourced police stations are built and staffed with more violent police. What’s missing from property destruction in isolation is the necessary social transformation of society alongside it. Abolishing the police can’t just involve temporarily removing their headquarters, it must involve a social transformation that abolishes and replaces the social function of police, with protective measures that answer to regular people not the state. The workers movement is the vehicle for such social transformation.
At the height of militant unionism, workers transformed by their experience in unions agreed to deny labour to projects deemed environmentally destructive, anti-Indigenous or anti-poor. At the request of the Yungngora People, transport workers refused to transport equipment for oil drilling, and drill workers refused to drill the oil. Due to the threat posed by the unions at the time, Amax, the American oil company behind the drilling had to be bribed by the Perth government to keep the job.
Militant Builders Laborers have refused to demolish low-incoming housing and supported housing projects in urban and remote areas. They refused certain jobs until affected communities were consulted about what they wanted built instead, like in 1976 with Melbourne’s Chinatown. They even engaged in work-ins to prove that workers could operate without bosses. Through organising led by Aboriginal unionists like Kevin “Cookie” Cooke and Sol Bellear, the BLF funded the Aboriginal Tent Embassy as well as financed education scholarships for First Nations adult learners. This is all part of a process of social transformation to facilitate workers having the agency to control their fate, and manifest the will of communities in what they create and build, instead of capitalists interested in profit. Though unionists were known for demolishing the work of scab laborers undermining their actions, property destruction in isolation is not a cheat code to the social transformation we need.
The state can pull an activist off train tracks uncontested, so that a worker can continue transporting coal, but a worker can’t be forced to drive a coal train if unions place and enforce bans on coal, and threaten large-scale industrial action should scab workers be hired to do the job instead. Furthermore, demands to end whole industries must come from workers themselves demanding a just transition away from the destructive industries they work in. Campaigns like Stop Adani were built from outside of the unions, and workers became the campaign’s biggest opponents, aided and supported by right-wing opportunists like Pauline Hanson that grew support protecting mining jobs.
Power mitigates risk
It’s hard to imagine a left where standing up against injustice doesn’t involve the risks activists endure today, but militant unionists in the 1970s proved it’s possible. During the anti-uranium movement, community activists took direct action to block docks where yellow-cake uranium was being exported. They were smashed by police and dragged into divvy vans by their hair before they could cause any disruptions at all. Workers however, were able to refuse to load ships with uranium for up to two months at a time, dwarfing even the best attempts at economic disruptions today.
Were workers left alone because community direct action is seen as more powerful than workers direct action by the state and had to be shut down? No, it’s because the underlying threat of power that unions held far outweighed the threat of small bands of radicals. The state knew that messing with workers at the docks could metastasise into larger more costly actions in other industries committed to the ban on uranium. Luckily for the bosses, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the peak union body attached to the Labor Party, was always willing to collaborate with the ruling class and pose as a friend to workers while quietly suggesting workers call off militant activity like this. Like any class enemy, conservative elements of the union movement need to be out-organised and smashed.
One railway worker, James Assenbruck, was fired for upholding the ban on uranium and refusing to load a train with materials going to a uranium mine. His sacking kicked off a nation-wide railway workers strike which led to Assenbruck’s immediate reinstatement. Unions knew that workers couldn’t be expected to risk their jobs, jail or fines to fight for justice, so workers that did stand up were vehemently protected for doing so.
Militant unions like the BLF even fought for contracts that forced bosses to hire organisers of previous campaigns that bosses wanted to ice out of the industry. This ensured workers that stood up for others were rewarded instead of punished. If we ‘prefigure’ anything about the world we want, it should be by creating structures like these unions did that reward acts of solidarity, rather than a process of negative moral pressure that asks us to accept punishment and sacrifice with grace. As proven by this era of struggle, honey indeed catches more flies than vinegar.
Regarding repressive laws and jail terms, Tramways Union General Secretary Clarrie O’Shea was locked up for unpaid fines the union accrued undertaking unprotected industrial action for its members. To set a precedent that the union movement wouldn’t be bullied by the state for fighting for workers, a million worker general strike kicked off. Striking workers shut down electricity, trains and trams, even media workers disrupted TV broadcasts. This led to O’Shea’s prompt release from prison. The strike also ensured that the anti-union laws of the time were never used again — a byproduct of how brutal the strike wave was on the ruling class. This birthed an unprecedented era of militant unionism. Again proving that through winning, we can grow movements and increase our collective ambition. During this era, the state and media attempted to slander and undermine the unions as they do with the CFMEU today. Still, upwards of 50% of workers were in their unions in the 1970s because unions were organisations integral to protecting workers’ material interests.
Blockade Australia says that “State repression does have an alarming effect on activists, but for many of us it only hardens our resolve and determination”. There is a popular idea that state repression means the strategy must be working. But the fact the state is comfortable repressing movements can be a sign of a weak movement without popular support. Of course, strong movements can be repressed as well, but if the potential for counter-retaliation is great enough, the state will hesitate before smashing movements. The defeat of the union movement was less by police with batons, and more through legislation and backdoor deals between self-interested union bureaucrats and the government conspiring to end the right to strike in exchange for automatic annual pay rises. Though the pay raises were short-lived, great effort was put into convincing workers this was a step forward for the movement. Like the O’Shea general strike proves, these defeats can be reversed by rebuilding a fighting workers’ movement.
The safeguarding of a movement’s participants and the incentivisation of productive action are things that help align the desire for mass participation with the possibility of it, but that only works when you build real power. Crowdfunding fines is one thing, but preventing your activists having to be locked up for 3 months or 5 years is another entirely. Those that seek mass participation but condemn their activists to sacrifice won’t find it, and those that seek social change through small clandestine direct action won’t get what they want.
Correcting course
As we’ve demonstrated, movements don’t have to choose between economic disruption or mass participation — they can have both. Movements that are targeted and repressed don’t inevitably have to go underground and become more extreme, we have demonstrated another path forward entirely. But that path starts in the workplace and in the unions.
In many ways the modern left’s approach to social change is the inversion of the class struggle of the old left, both in strategy and in results. Where the modern left requires, justifies and normalises risk and sacrifice to encourage participation, class struggle encourages participation by mitigating against risk and sacrifice and even rewards efforts of solidarity. Where the modern left acts before it builds the power to win, class struggle builds power to win before acting. Where the modern left requires moralism to work, a strategy of class struggle can work even with the most self-interested worker. And where the modern left’s resume is stark, a strategy of class struggle has proven capable of social change.
The state of the unions today is in part a reflection of the left’s neglect of them, and a testament to the power they were developing to shape the world in favour of the poor not the rich. The capitalist class could not stand idly by while workers fired their bosses and denied them the developments and profit they sought. The inside deals and collaboration by union leaders was an unforgivable betrayal of the working class’s ability to bargain for itself against the forces of capital. To see the destruction of the workers’ movement as the irrelevance of class power as leverage against capitalism is a mistake the left has paid for over the last 50 years.
While the move away from big musty communist organisations that became puppets of Stalin or Mao was the right move by the left, the move away from organisationalism and class power was not. Through democratic organisations like anarchists build, we bring together militant workers into a shared strategy that aims to collectively push from below within our unions. We do this until our forces can’t be ignored and the hacks stifling workers power are cast aside, and we develop more directly democratic, member-operated and militant unions once again.
This era of disappointments demonstrates that there is no substitution for class power, and there is no leaving workers out of movements that want any hope of serious social change or revolution.