direct action

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direct action (usually uncountable, plural direct actions)

1. A form of political activism in which participants act directly, ignoring established political procedures. It may take the form of strikes, workplace occupations, sabotage, sit-ins, squatting, revolutionary/guerrilla warfare, demonstrations, vandalism or graffiti.
   • 1912, Voltairine de Cleyre, Direct Action:

     Or there are those who believe that in general the wisest way for people to get what they want is by the indirect method of voting into power some one who will make what they want legal; yet who all the same will occasionally under exceptional conditions advise a strike; and a strike, as I have said, is direct action.

   • 2009, David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography, AK Press, →ISBN, page 203:

     It should be easy enough to see why anarchists have always been drawn to direct action.

   • 2017 November 7, Eugene D., “Sutherland Springs Shooter Member of Far-Right Neo-Nazi Group “Atomwaffen””, in Medium‎^[1], archived from the original on 23 April 2023:

     Here is what Atomwaffen believes. In short, they believe in violent, direct action that energizes what they call “the Aryan base,” and agitates “the white race” towards a final race war through acts of terror and violence. They believe that terrorist acts will expose some perceived inherent pride among the white colonialists and lead to a bloody mass uprising that ends in the establishment of a white ethnostate at the point of a gun.

2. (military) Small-scale raids, ambushes, sabotage, etc. carried out by the military.

• direct actionist
• direct activist