ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a concept routinely employed as a synonym for anarchism, namely direct action. Anarchist direct action is infinitely multiform and unbounded; it encompasses different actors and situations and goes beyond an elitist revolutionary vanguard. Its praxis provokes disorder and invention, hierarchy is destroyed, verticality disappears because everything is circulating horizontally, and what is collective also becomes connective. Tools for developing skills of resistance, autonomy, initiative and criticism are key political elements of anarchism. Direct action represents one of the instruments anarchists use to implement their anti-hierarchy emancipatory struggle and to counteract the global network of power relations. The chapter further highlights the fact that, for anarchists, poetry has been understood as a means of agitation through the poetic word. The poetic word becomes a tool for combat that has a revolutionary and propagandistic function on the one hand and an ethical-aesthetic dimension on the other.
