Direct action is action that achieves its goal directly, without appealing to an intermediary authority — a legislature, a court, a party — for permission or implementation. If you are hungry and you grow food, that is direct action. If you petition a representative to fund a food program, that is not.
The concept is central to anarchist practice because it embodies the refusal of mediation that anarchism theorizes. Direct action does not ask the structures of domination to reform themselves; it acts outside them. This includes a wide range of practices: mutual aid, strikes, blockades, sabotage, occupation, land defense, and the construction of autonomous infrastructure. What unifies them is not a tactic but a relationship to authority — these actions do not depend on authorization.
Direct action is often contrasted with symbolic protest (marching, petitioning, voting), but the distinction is not absolute. A blockade that physically prevents a pipeline from being built is direct action. A march that shifts public opinion, which then shifts policy, which then stops the pipeline, is indirect. The anarchist critique is not that indirect action is always wrong but that it accepts a dependency on the very structures being challenged — and that this dependency shapes what can be demanded.