Book Review: "Direct Action" by L.A. Kauffman

Direct Action:
Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism
By L.A. Kauffman
London, UK: Verso, 2017. 236 pages, paperback.

L.A. Kauffman begins her new book asking the question that plagues every activist and revolutionary on the American left: what happened after the 1960s? Why did the movement die or where did it go? Peaks and troughs are to be expected in political activity, but it's been over forty years since the height of the anti-war movement. Surely something should have happened in the intervening four decades.

Historians have tackled this question in numerous ways. Some focus on the massive assault against organized labor under Reagan and Thatcher. Those with a more international focus point toward the fall of the Soviet Union and "globalization" of the world economy following the third-world debt crisis.

Kauffman is much more interested in the subjective factors leading to the downfall of the left. In other words, she wants to know which theoretical frameworks and lines of thought among revolutionaries lead to our current situation. Objective factors might be ultimately beyond our control but a certain amount of blame and plaudits must be placed on past activists for their actions.

As the title suggests, Direct Action digs into the development of protest politics since the beginning of the 70s. From the Anti-war movement of the sixties to the global justice movement of the 90s to Black Lives Matter of our current era, she draws a straight line across forty years of movements and dramatic actions that would otherwise look disparate and hopelessly unconnected.

She opens the book with possibly the only in-depth account of the Mayday Movement of 1971 ever written. Founded in the wake of SDS's dissolution, the May Day Movement launched an audacious plan to shut down Washington DC as a protest against the ongoing war in Vietnam. Taking to heart the Weathermen maxim of "Bring the War Home," thousands of activists attempted to block crucial choke points around the city and stop the city for a whole day. By the end of the day, over 7,000 people were locked up by the police, which makes it the largest mass arrest in US history. Though they ultimately weren't successful, the action did serve to rattle the Nixon administration at the height of its paranoia.

Despite it's impressive milestones, the events of Mayday 1971 remain by and large unremembered. Indeed, it seems rather curious for such a dramatic event to inaugurate the long term decline of the left, which has spent literally forty years in the wilderness. This isn't to say that nothing was happening; the book traces the lineage of the Mayday Movement through the anti-nukes movement and the fledgling environmentalism of the time. Along the way, she recounts the success of the anti-apartheid movement and the drafting of the Combahee River Statement, often considered the founding document of what's vaguely termed "identity politics." The most well written and compelling section of the books details the history of ACT-UP, the organization of militant AIDS activists famous for such attention getting stunts as throwing the cremains of AIDS victims on the White House lawn. Her writing on the anti-war movement of the early 2000s is spare and could have been fleshed out more, but her recounting of Occupy and Black Lives Matter are full of insight.

After cataloguing in minute detail the twists and turns of protest politics over four decades, one must ask the crucial question: "So what? What was it all for? What do we have to show for all these efforts?"

For her part, Kauffman doesn't demean or totally write-off these political movements. Even the most suspect developments, such as the consensus process that has plagued us since the Anti-nukes heyday, are given their fair hearing. Kauffman points out many of the important roles organizers and activists had in bearing the torch through the lean and mean Reagan years when all hope seemed lost. The activists and organizers come across as sympathetic and sincere and their ardor stands beyond reproach.

That said, Kauffman isn't afraid to criticize when criticism is very much deserved. Throughout the book, American individualism bleeds through almost every word spoken by organizers attempting to justify their actions. Anyone who sat through a General Assembly at an Occupy encampment or endured an anarchist spiel on the Black Bloc knows just how much American leftists love to focus on tactics to the exclusion of strategy and balanced forethought. An action, a demonstration, even an organizing meeting isn't justified by its efficacy but rather by how it made everyone who participated feel.

This comes out clearly when activists are faced with the very serious task of organization building. The problem isn't so much that no one wants to build organizations, but rather that all organizations are hobbled at the get-go by arbitrary structures that are never justified by the desired final outcome of the struggle. For example, instead of having a democratically elected leadership to an organization accountable to its membership and the movement as a whole, activists gather themselves into small grouplets based on "affinity" (read: personal friendship) and do essentially whatever they please so long as they don't directly interfere with any other affinity group. Attempts to coordinate these affinity groups have mixed results at best. Such efforts might work (emphasis on might) for one-off events, but such a system is harder to sustain the larger and longer lasting it becomes. The "anti-hierarchical" character of these organizational forms is also called into question; despite the diffuse nature of affinity groups, at the end of the day, most of the heavy lifting falls on a small group of people who aren't even elected into these roles. It's just movement bureaucracy with extra steps.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that affinity groups are never helpful or useful; sometimes political action requires a bit of law-breaking and it might be better to put the onus for those actions on smaller groups and not larger organizations. That said, what exactly are we trying to do here? Create a criminal organization? At least the mafia can turn a profit. Assuming we will need a movement of millions to overturn the prevailing order, how can we hope to integrate the masses into an organizational framework that forever aspires to an honorable criminality of a Dickens novel? Do activists want to remain plucky underdogs, or do they want to win?