Direct Action cannot be Televised!

Since Seattle, global financial and trade organizations have been honing up their media image. To get us to bargain with them they have tried to look sympathetic and concerned. The meeting in Prague was full of talk about poverty. During the meeting in Prague a World Bank ad said “the purpose of the World Bank has always been fighting poverty.” Another mentions “justice for all”. The World Bank seems to have learned from the media master—Bill Clinton--how to create a compassionate image. In Seattle Clinton said, “I sympathize with the protestors.” Then Tony Blair (a man famous for copying Clinton’s tricks) made a similar statement during the oil price/tax road blockades in September. He expressed sympathy but said in his public-school accent that he disagrees with their methods and that “they’re not going through the proper channels”. As if he would have conceded to their demands if they’d been more polite. A week later in Prague we hear the same Clintonesque bullshit, a World Bank representative said: “We sympathize with the questions the protestors are proposing but we disagree with their methods. We think they’re going about this in the wrong way. We want dialogue not force.” Then, another World Bank representative said: “These are important meetings, about ending AIDS and poverty; what we want is dialogue not diatribes….We want a globalization that will benefit everybody.” And to top it off, James Wolfenson, President of the World Bank said: “Poverty is in our neighborhood wherever we live.” I’d love to be the poor person that lives in his neighborhood.

The fact that the World Bank wants dialogue is a measure of our success in the streets. They are desperate for us to choose dialogue over direct action because they know that dialogue with them would be ineffective, that they could never really concede to our demands. They can listen to us, politely respond, even make minor adjustments, but they all eventually go home to a gated community of oblivion and have a martini. This is why they want to channel the force of our direct action into appeals, petitions and attempts to manipulate the mainstream media. The first step in this process is sorting out who should be represented; to let us fight amongst ourselves for who gets the best media representation. Even the BBC recognized the recent rise of Direct Action as a tactic in an article about Prague and the September road blockades; of course, they think this is a bad thing. Our enemies recognize the power of our direct action and are taking counter measures. The fact that they beg for dialogue exposes their fear and thus our power. The scraps handed down to us in order to appease us and divert us must be refused. Compromise with any transcendent institution (the State, WTO, WB, IMF, the Party etc.) is always the alienation of our power to the very institutions we supposedly wish to destroy; this sort of compromise results in the forfeiture of our power to act decisively, to make decisions and actions in the time we choose. As such, compromise only makes the state and capital stronger.

These image games are smoke signals sent to lure us into the media den, a place where ideas become opinion that is endlessly produced and reproduced and nothing is actually done. The media den is a place where thought becomes inept; thought is divorced from action when it becomes merely choice of position. To defer action in hope that such representation will lead to a change in WB or IMF policy for example is to give up our own capacity to act when and where action is necessary: to leave the decision to others and resign one's own power. If one opposes capitalism as a whole then such a tactic is especially absurd: the WB or IMF would never dismantle itself. The media den is the master of manipulation, it intoxicates us until we are satisfied to leave matters in other hands. Meanwhile, we lose our most effective weapon, our capacity to act. In acting we create social relations; in practice the struggling multitude self-organizes. But organization always poses the danger of limiting our active power.

On the internet and in several publications some people have begun to call on the ‘direct action’ milieu to move away from confrontation. This points to what is perhaps the biggest danger to the continuing struggle against capitalism, the danger posed by those within ‘the movement’ who are waiting for a chance to represent the movement in a dialogue with the institutions of capital and with the state, those willing to compromise, to end the “deadlock”, to petition for a scrap. Such compromisers usually work within various permanent organizations that have grown up within the movement whose prime focus is the media. But the work of these organizations aims at effecting ‘public opinion’ and getting a back seat at the table of power, and involves a complex process of managing the image of the multitude that rises up against the institutions of capital. Within their heads, these organizers chant the mantra “only that which appears in the media exists,” as they frantically go from one interview to the next, for in the end they are more interested in what is on TV than what is going on in the streets, in the woods, in the night. This involves two steps. First, such organizations attempt to organize and discipline the multitude of active individuals involved in the struggle. Second, they attempt to manage the representation of the action in the media.

The first step involves taking a multitude, an undisciplined conglomeration of individuals and groups with different desires, and shaping them as best as possible into a mass of disciplined bodies. Foremost, this means separating decision from the necessity of its moment and setting rules of behavior that stand above all the participants. This has even meant physically stopping people from acting and turning people into police. The organizers are willing to sacrifice the most active in order to get a seat at the table of power. This attempt to contain the action is usually only partially successful and the media organizations mill us down in their image-factories to produce material for constructing a ‘proper’ representation, cutting off the pieces that don’t conform to their bland tastes. They become the spokespeople, eagerly offering themselves up to the media in easily digestible bite size morsels. The spin-doctors speak for the movement, naming it in their image, always hoping for a bigger slice of the evening, half-hour pie. But those who wish to fight on the terrain of image, base their strategic decisions on an idealized notion of political discourse. In fact, this notion of political discourse is no different from the story that the media and democracy tells about itself. Can the organizers be so naïve?

Of course, contrary to the dominant notion of political discourse to which the organizers subscribe, there is no open terrain of political exchange and participation; what we have is a spectacular apparatus of images that produce and regulate ‘public opinion.’ Public opinion is not something that is first found among the public in general and then afterwards replayed through the media, as a simple reporting of the public mood. An opinion is produced by the media itself; it is a flattened, uniformed idea devoid of all life and connection with desire that is reproduced a million fold through the media. Public opinion is offered up to the passive consumer as one more commodity, as a simple choice: are you for globalization or for national protection? Are you for third-world debt relief or should they pay what they owe? No thinking necessary; we fall right into place, or we are supposed to. Opinions are massified ideas, and offer no hope of communicating our desires for a qualitatively different world. Can the organizers be so naïve? The question that the media organizations constantly pose to us is, should we follow Tony Blair and the World Bank’s advice and leadership and join in a dialogue with power? Should we forgo our active powers and move the struggle from direct action and attack into the struggle over image? Our very strength is the creative use of our active powers of attack; their greatest strength is their control over the technologies of image reproduction, the media. If we want to completely destroy the present order, we can’t win by fighting on TV.

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