A familiar middle-class reflex is to wave away direct action by saying it’s “just for attention.” My friend did it when the flotilla sailed to Gaza, brushing it off as spectacle. The move is tidy: if the act is about attention, then it’s not about politics, not about justice, not about material change. It becomes personal—about the actor’s ego—not collective.
But David Graeber would remind us that all politics is, in some sense, about attention. Power is organized around what is seen and unseen, what makes it into the realm of the sayable. Direct action, in Graeber’s words, is the insistence on enacting the world you want to see, even if only for a moment, outside the permission of the state. To dismiss this as attention-seeking is to confuse the currency with the purchase. Yes, it draws eyes. But the point is not vanity; it’s to rupture the normal order long enough that another possibility flickers into view.
Middle-class politics tends to fetishize respectability: petitions, panels, letters to the editor. It wants change without disruption, justice without confrontation. To that sensibility, the flotilla looks embarrassing—messy, loud, personal. But that’s because it forces into visibility the violence we’d rather keep abstract. Attention is not the by-product; it’s the battleground.
Graeber might put it this way: “If you are told that what you are doing is ‘not action,’ that it is ‘merely symbolic,’ you are likely doing something right.” Symbolic action is still action. It creates openings in the imagination. The critique that direct action is “just for show” misses the deeper truth—that power itself is held together by ritual, ceremony, and performance. States hold parades. Armies raise flags. Markets ring opening bells. Why, then, should the people not stage their own interruptions?
So when my friend says the flotilla was only attention-seeking, I think: exactly. The question is whose attention, and to what.
