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RIP Matt.
I truly believe that groups and projects like “upping the anti” are precisely the kinds that create alienating milieus with their outdated vocabularies - revolutionaries, militants, the radical Left, etc., and calls to sacrifice, discipline, etc. A sea of disciplined, militant, humourless berets will never lead to a new world, to regeneration, to helping shed settler colonial outlooks and practices. Also groups like upping the anti itself have been highlighting the same three goals for decades - anti-oppression, anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism - but rarely mention anti-statism and certainly don’t centre it. Yet anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism will only be solved by abolishing the nation state. So how deep really is that commitment? And oppression by eliminating politics/hierarchy, so why not include an anti-authoritarian goal as well?

If we want a new world, to create space for ourselves, we need to fight, but fighting doesn’t mean Leftism/activism, anarcho-Maoism, etc. It doesn’t have to mean smug humourlessness, self-sacrifice, causes, etc.

Also, perhaps the author of this biography wasn’t around prior to 2010, but it seems bizarre to make the claim that that is the specific year that “anti-colonial politics came to the forefront of anarchist analysis in so called Canada.” Geez, skimming through a variety of Canadian anarchist newspapers from the 1980s, nearly 30 years before 2010 - No Picnic, Open Road, Kick it Over, etc- and a large part of the content is about indigenous struggles, decolonizing, etc.

Activism relies on a (joyless?) sacrifice of ones life for a greater cause. How can we make our lives and our fight intertwine? A milieu is not a community - don’t expect mutual aid, solidarity, empathy, emotional support, deep friendships, etc to come out of them.

This isn’t to say that groups like upping the anti are heartless or authoritarians. It’s just that the tragedy of Matt’s death, to me at least, is located in the mistaken ideas that a milieu is a community and that Left activism is resistance.