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right i mean i think some essentially sound critiques like this have been going on for a while about antifa work, both its theory and practice - seems to denote a kind of defensive/reactive action, proximal to common front-ism, etc - that often seem to miss something that seems most obvious to me which is like, its more on the order of a bucket brigade because our fucking house is burning down?! like, look, there are hippies who do food not bombs type projects because they genuinely think they will 'overgrow the system' or whatever, and there are nihilists who still appreciate projects like that because even if the loftiest goals weren't aimed for much less achieved, some people got to eat, some people became friends, etc. it takes a certain level of privilege not to have to give a shit that roving bands of white supremacist terrorists are mobilizing to terrorize large portions of society, it's a terrible time to be in when this is happening and happening on a continuum with all sorts of other horrible things (basically, continuous with all the rest of western history and politics) and it reminds me somewhat of stuff like katrina, anarchists were out responding to an emergency that most people just didn't give a shit about because it didn't concern them directly.

a lot of this sounds like the critique of activism that the insurrectionist 'wave' of about 10 years ago was putting forth, about anarchists functioning as the more militant foot soldiers of liberals/the left, and i guess you can go egoist about it but a lot of those people considered themselves post left but didn't stop going to protests and being involved in other projects that they tried to push in different directions. for some (like IGD) this led to an ever greater embrace of the left but not always and i think this is part of what the conclusion is getting at. (see also my conclusion)

i don't really get much of a sense here though of what the author actually is aspiring towards ('lives of our own choosing', ok...?), it strikes me mostly as yet another @-on-@ shit talk piece, polemical and not very useful, and the characterizations of 161 tend toward the sort of things the center and right say (mindless, violent puritans...). maybe because i've been far from the front lines most of the past few years i'm just overly appreciative of those who are still out there. it also occurs to me that pieces like this, if not primarily ideological in their criticisms, are circling around hinting at some kind of actual dumpster fire scenarios that it might be better to find a more direct way to talk about? it's really all so vague....what would the author think of the anti-i.c.e. stuff? im left guessing.

finally i want to suggest maybe hauling up some of the history of 161 in the 90s/00s and the debates that were happening then. it was different for a lot of reasons but it would be facile to act like it was completely so; a lot of the same arguments happened in slightly different ways. @s often predominated then and when they didn't, they organized autonomously. there was a lot of overlap with anti police , eco defense, squatting etc. it's also worth mentioning the likes of the 2005 toledo incident where anarchists put a lot of effort into countering a nazi rally, which led to a community-based anti-police uprising. even if antifascism is necessarily 'weakness' i think a lot of these types of incidents, both then and more recently, have been very instructive to a lot of participants as to how much weaker the left and center are even when confronting what should be an obvious all hands on deck type situation. thus it's space for anti-authoritarians to demonstrate what is unique about their approach....or on the other hand to demonstrate indifference to the attacks on marginalized groups. https://web.archive.org/web/20051030032032/http://www.clamormagazine.org...