is that what you actually think i want?

Recently I had something of a heated conversation in the local food not bombs chat. If you’re reading this sometime in the future, for context: about a day before the time of this conversation, ICE officers killed someone again in Minneapolis, in front of her wife. The whole thing was recorded by another activist there on the scene, and it was all anyone could talk about for some time. At the time of writing, it has sparked an angry response in Minneapolis, and there is a general strike planned in the next week.

Everyone wants to do something.

I in particular, happened to be more fed up with a certain liberal-democrat organization that’s dominating the local organizing space, interested mostly in peaceful, nondisruptive and symbolic action. Awareness raising, state-sanctioned marches, canvassing, that kind of thing. Unwilling to break the law. I happen to be a fan of more direct forms of action and I don’t particularly respect a law that’s designed to subjugate and silence those without power, and I said something to that effect in their chat. There were several folks there who agreed with my analysis, but the entire conversation was shut down, as the administrators were unwilling to allow discussion of illegal actions.

I decided to just leave the chat. Perhaps not the wisest move if I want to keep tabs on them, but I was disgusted with the whole affair and couldn’t really tolerate it anymore. I also complained, as I said, in the local food not bombs chat. The responses I got there were- also extremely frustrating.

In particular, one stuck with me:

You can’t just expect every group to work the way you want.

May I remind you that this is the FNB group, supposedly full of anarchists.

I don’t expect the group to work the way I want, I want more agency in the world, not less. But dammit- the fact that this person made the assumption that I wanted to control the way the group functioned because I critiqued its outcomes seems entirely antithetical to my conception of anarchism itself. I don’t complain about the state because I want the steering wheel!

But apparently not everyone around me shares that line of thinking.