Our desires, like the rest of us, are created by the conditions that we find ourselves in. Some have said that desire is not an expression of lack; that it produces. Another replied: desire is the space between repression and freedom through which capital first entered its colonized subjects. Maybe so. What is clear is that desire cannot constitute itself as a force against capital. In ‘Wrecking You Again’, the word desire is used again and again. It is used as the motive, cause, and description of all action, but it is never defined.

Exclamations of desire replace critical analysis. Significance and scale are forgotten. Any understanding of capitalism is left behind in favor of a pure subjectivism. The cult of militancy flourishes in this self-referential subjectivity. It affirms itself again and again. Now it attaches itself to the anarchist myth of “social war”. Now it calls itself anti-political. Now it awkwardly quotes pop music (even for extremists the urge towards populism is too strong to avoid). In words it lashes out against the activist, the protest, the blockade – all the things that allow it to exist. It demands sacrifice – not only of the direct participants, but also of onlookers, who are now mere human shields in a game of simulated gang violence.

It seems the anarchists are so self-enamored that they have deliberately achieved such a level of intellectual and practical decomposition that they are now unable to function beyond the ordinary parameters and worldview of a street gang (and that is an insult to street gangs who at least define themselves in terms of a real territory).

— What is Desire? [via]