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Civil disobedience is a specific form of direct action that involves intentionally violating a law because that law is unjust — for instance, refusing to pay taxes that would fund a war, or refusing to comply with anti-immigrant legislation. In these circumstances, breaking the law is the purpose. With other kinds of direct action, laws may be broken, but the law being broken isn’t the point.
(From Beautiful Trouble —A toolbox for revolution)
Everything we take for granted: the weekend, gay rights, contraception, women wearing trousers, the right to strike, to form a union, the abolition of slavery. Everything was won by disobedience, fought for by people who refused and resisted, claimed back from those in power. Their disobedience was a gift to our future.
Every form of rebellion we know, from protest marches to lock-ons, barricades to boycotts, factory occupations to street parties, super glue actions to climate camps was invented, dreamt up and designed. More often than not, by a small group of people huddled together, laughing and creatively conspiring with each other; engineering the art of resistance.
[…] Put the fun between your legs, become the bike bloc.
(From The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, before the COP15)
Direct action is at the heart of all human advancement. Sound like a grandiose claim? It is. But it’s also beautifully simple: direct action means that we take collective action to change our circumstances, without handing our power to a middle-person.
[…] Because direct action is a physical act, it often speaks louder and deeper than anything you might say or write. Ideally, you should choose your target and design your action so that the action itself tells the story.
[…] Direct action involves significant levels of risk for all involved. It is imperative to be careful, conscious and deliberate about the risks you take.
(From Beautiful Trouble —A toolbox for revolution)
To give a glimpse of the Utopia we’re working for; to show how the world could be; to make such a world feel not just possible, but irresistible.
[…] Prefigurative interventions are direct actions sited at the point of assumption — where beliefs are made and unmade, and the limits of the possible can be stretched. The goal of a prefigurative intervention is twofold: to offer a compelling glimpse of a possible, and better, future, and also — slyly or baldly — to point up the poverty of imagination of the world we actually do live in.
(From Beautiful Trouble —A toolbox for revolution)