Direct Action

Autonomy means direct action, not waiting for requests to pass through the “established channels” only to bog down in paperwork and endless negotiations. Establish your own channel. If you want hungry people to eat, don’t just give money to some high-handed charity bureaucracy; find out where food is going to waste, collect it, and feed them. If you want affordable housing, don’t try to get the town council to pass a bill—that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take over abandoned buildings and share them, and organize groups to defend them when the thugs of absentee landlords show up. If you want corporations to have less power, don’t petition the politicians they bought to put limits on their own masters; find ways to work with others to simply take the power from them: don’t buy their products, don’t work for them, sabotage their billboards, prevent their meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered. They use similar tactics to exert their power over you; it only looks valid because they bought the laws and social customs, too.

Don’t wait for permission or organization from some outside authority, don’t beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Act.

Reprinted from Making stuff & Doing Things : A Collection of DIY Guides to Doing Just About Everything (Edited by Kyle Bravo). Originally: Crimethinc., from Harbinger