This kind of assessment and debate is not new. It appears virtually every year within the direct action community, and sinks like a stone several weeks after every major demonstration in this town. It's become a ritual in its own right.

Three years ago, the debate raged around why Chicago anarchists and autonomists could not replicate the work of San Francisco's Direct Action Against the War and the decentralized direct actions - street blockades, lockdowns ect, that paraylized the heart of that city at the onset of the war. ( that formation has since evaporated in the Bay area -- unable to repeat the success of that first action ) Or why the direct action advocates here in Chicago have consistently failed to develop and sustain more than a handful of affinity groups willing to undertake that kind of tactical scenario and the organizing it requires. Perhaps the inability of direct action activists across the country to yet figure out how to counter the preemptive repressive measures and massive police mobilization enshrined in the Miami Model have something to do with this. (ironically, CodePink activists - as 'fluffy' as they might be - have had far more success in carrying out effective antiwar direct actions in Chicago without having to piggyback onto larger permitted protests - by using wickedly seditious humor, good planning and surprise.)

Few anarchists are willing to risk an arrest - or a head cracking - without any reasoned plan for effectively achieving a strategic goal that might be empowering and advance the struggle. Why in the hell should they --or anybody else do so? Which is why for all the macho posturing on Saturday eve at State and Walton, not one affinity group moved to try and break through cop lines. - or break out from Daley Plaza later that night.

Face it. Retreating into 'back in the day' romantic fantasies about Seattle, Quebec, the RNC - invoking Situationist nostalgia or living vicariously by surfing the Web for the latest riot porn video being generated in the streets of Paris this week won't get us any closer building the kind of real decentralized, autonomist network capable of both grassroots mobilization and creative direct action. Organizing militant direct actions are certainly necessary tasks for any antiwar and anti-imperialist movement seeking to raise the stakes and move from beyond protest to resistance. But confrontational direct action is only one tool in the box, not an end in itself- unless all you care about is the spectacle - and not the outcome. Pulling it off successfully requires a back to basics approach - including organizing our own direct action trainings, building new affinity groups, organizing spokescouncils, developing legal and jail support, fundraising, medical and logistical resources -- and remembering security culture. All hard work which we cannot expect the liberals to do for us. And it's useful to remember that during the FTAA protests in Quebec, the enormous popular support generated there for direct action was in large part the result of almost a year of patient community outreach.

M-18 this year - for all its warts - was what it was. One of the largest antiwar demonstrations in the US on the third anniversary of the war. Conventional, contained, permitted protest. Yet the floats and the performances of the All American Antiwar Band added a carnival of resistance flavor to the night -- something missing from earlier mass moblizations here. And no doubt the both the cops and the local apologists for the war were truly pissed that we were finally on the Mag Mile - three years after 800 people were arrested for trying to do the same