In August I went to the National DSA Convention in Chicago, where several radical bookstores and small presses were tabling. At the table for Pilsen Community Books I picked up a cute sticker that says “Always Carry A Book” and a copy of Nick Montgomery and carla bergman’s Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. I successfully talked the book group into reading it with me, and am very excited to discuss it this weekend because it definitely seems like the kind of book that should be read in a group and not just off on one’s own.
Joyful Militancy takes as its subject the problem of “rigid radicalism,” a phenomenon that anyone who has spent a lot of time in organizing spaces or social-justice/leftish-flavored non-organizing spaces with pretensions of activism (such as: certain parts of the internet) will instantly recognize, even if you are the person doing it (because other people are probably doing rigid radicalism for flavors other than yours, and it’s easier to see when it’s not you). Due to the instant recognizability it is possibly not necessary to actually define rigid radicalism, but Montgomery and bergman aren’t going to fall into any dumb “vampire’s castle” type traps of just assuming you’ve got the exact same experiences and take they do on how The Vibes Are Bad, Man. Instead, they give a whole intellectual and philosophical history of the concept, tracing it to earlier lines of thinking about the problem of bad vibes in leftist/left-ish spaces, including Spinoza’s writings about “sad militancy” and Eve Sedgwick’s writings about paranoid readings.
As a paranoid reader of writings about social justice in a way that I wasn’t eight years ago, I particularly appreciated how self-aware this book was about the possible pitfalls of critiquing rigid radicalism and exploring the book’s positive concept of joyful militancy (which is also defined and contextualized in a philosophical and historical tradition, all very interesting stuff, lots of Spinoza). The authors are careful to stress that they don’t want joyful militancy to turn into another duty or demand, which I appreciate. I have a distinct memory of planning an action and a comrade made a perfectly good point about adding a fun element to it since, he said, we didn’t often really make a point of showing our joy in antifascist work, and I remember having an instant negative reaction, like “We’ve got enough shit to do to pull this action off and now we have to add ‘show our joy’ to the to-do list?” This was deeply unfair to the comrade, who was actually making a good suggestion. But you see how the psychological trap works–the authors of the book have a good long section trying to separate out joy from happiness, the thing we are constitutionally mandated to continually be in pursuit of, and that companies try to take away from us for the purpose of selling it back for money. At the end of the day the terminology used to differentiate things into two separate concepts is less important than understanding the process by which supposedly freeing concepts become tiresome when they become duties or expectations. (See also: my experiences of people being “supportive” of me exploring “my” sexuality and being confused and hurt when I experienced this “support” as pressuring and invasive.)
I said in my review of Emergent Strategy that I have a hard time trusting any writing about proper leftist behavior that isn’t 90% caveats and doesn’t treat its readers like they’re stupid. I’m pleased to report that this book does seem to hit the “90% caveats” benchmark, which diffused my incipient panic attack well enough that I didn’t even mind that they treated the audience like it was intelligent enough to understand philosophy. I found some of the book a little vague but I found myself forgiving that when they discussed how they were anticipating various critiques of the book, including that it might be too vague or theoretical. I think the point they were making was that all this internalized critique and the endless ways in which leftists critique everything was generally kind of overkill, but it made me trust that they knew what they were talking about and they weren’t so naive as to think that their writing was so special and correct that it would magically get exempted from the bad leftist dynamics.
That said! This book does have some meat to it, especially in the back half. I really enjoyed their interviews with people who admitted to having gotten sucked into rigid radicalism, and why engaging in it is attractive to some people, and the very real places of hurt and trauma that can cause people to use it as a protection mechanism. The authors are good at hitting the balance of explaining the sympathetic origins of the behavior without then concluding that it isn’t a problem and actually the problem is people thinking it's a problem. They are also very clear about stressing that this isn’t an issue of one tendency or another; tendencies have their own ways of having it manifest but it’s basically the same shit every time, whether it manifests as liberal moralism or anti-liberal moralism, a totalizing demand for organizational discipline or a totalizing demand for individual autonomy (there’s an interesting snippet of an interview with a recovered “manarchist” about his realization that all his high theory bullshit about not being controlled by the state just looked to a lot of people like another angry white guy doing whatever the fuck he wanted). Interviewees talk about the important of celebrating the small wins and the partial wins, and the deadening effect of the reflexive leftist habit to always stop to remind people that whatever today’s win is Isn’t Good Enough because it has not fully dismantled all oppression and brought us to anarchocommunist utopia (looking at you, all the people who rushed to publish relentlessly correct takes about how Zohran Mamdani’s primary win isn’t the revolution. WE KNOW, aren’t you exhausted with yourself yet?).
This book is part of a series called “anarchist interventions” and as such it pretty clearly is intended for anarchists, but I know plenty of non-anarchist socialists who have gotten value from this book and as a non-anarchist socialist I also think it’s a really worthwhile read. I think Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You still has my top spot for Most Important Reading About Not Being That Person In Meetings but this is still a really valuable addition to the conversation about how to do leftism that doesn’t suck. Now I’ve just got to come up with some really good discussion questions for Sunday.
Joyful Militancy takes as its subject the problem of “rigid radicalism,” a phenomenon that anyone who has spent a lot of time in organizing spaces or social-justice/leftish-flavored non-organizing spaces with pretensions of activism (such as: certain parts of the internet) will instantly recognize, even if you are the person doing it (because other people are probably doing rigid radicalism for flavors other than yours, and it’s easier to see when it’s not you). Due to the instant recognizability it is possibly not necessary to actually define rigid radicalism, but Montgomery and bergman aren’t going to fall into any dumb “vampire’s castle” type traps of just assuming you’ve got the exact same experiences and take they do on how The Vibes Are Bad, Man. Instead, they give a whole intellectual and philosophical history of the concept, tracing it to earlier lines of thinking about the problem of bad vibes in leftist/left-ish spaces, including Spinoza’s writings about “sad militancy” and Eve Sedgwick’s writings about paranoid readings.
As a paranoid reader of writings about social justice in a way that I wasn’t eight years ago, I particularly appreciated how self-aware this book was about the possible pitfalls of critiquing rigid radicalism and exploring the book’s positive concept of joyful militancy (which is also defined and contextualized in a philosophical and historical tradition, all very interesting stuff, lots of Spinoza). The authors are careful to stress that they don’t want joyful militancy to turn into another duty or demand, which I appreciate. I have a distinct memory of planning an action and a comrade made a perfectly good point about adding a fun element to it since, he said, we didn’t often really make a point of showing our joy in antifascist work, and I remember having an instant negative reaction, like “We’ve got enough shit to do to pull this action off and now we have to add ‘show our joy’ to the to-do list?” This was deeply unfair to the comrade, who was actually making a good suggestion. But you see how the psychological trap works–the authors of the book have a good long section trying to separate out joy from happiness, the thing we are constitutionally mandated to continually be in pursuit of, and that companies try to take away from us for the purpose of selling it back for money. At the end of the day the terminology used to differentiate things into two separate concepts is less important than understanding the process by which supposedly freeing concepts become tiresome when they become duties or expectations. (See also: my experiences of people being “supportive” of me exploring “my” sexuality and being confused and hurt when I experienced this “support” as pressuring and invasive.)
I said in my review of Emergent Strategy that I have a hard time trusting any writing about proper leftist behavior that isn’t 90% caveats and doesn’t treat its readers like they’re stupid. I’m pleased to report that this book does seem to hit the “90% caveats” benchmark, which diffused my incipient panic attack well enough that I didn’t even mind that they treated the audience like it was intelligent enough to understand philosophy. I found some of the book a little vague but I found myself forgiving that when they discussed how they were anticipating various critiques of the book, including that it might be too vague or theoretical. I think the point they were making was that all this internalized critique and the endless ways in which leftists critique everything was generally kind of overkill, but it made me trust that they knew what they were talking about and they weren’t so naive as to think that their writing was so special and correct that it would magically get exempted from the bad leftist dynamics.
That said! This book does have some meat to it, especially in the back half. I really enjoyed their interviews with people who admitted to having gotten sucked into rigid radicalism, and why engaging in it is attractive to some people, and the very real places of hurt and trauma that can cause people to use it as a protection mechanism. The authors are good at hitting the balance of explaining the sympathetic origins of the behavior without then concluding that it isn’t a problem and actually the problem is people thinking it's a problem. They are also very clear about stressing that this isn’t an issue of one tendency or another; tendencies have their own ways of having it manifest but it’s basically the same shit every time, whether it manifests as liberal moralism or anti-liberal moralism, a totalizing demand for organizational discipline or a totalizing demand for individual autonomy (there’s an interesting snippet of an interview with a recovered “manarchist” about his realization that all his high theory bullshit about not being controlled by the state just looked to a lot of people like another angry white guy doing whatever the fuck he wanted). Interviewees talk about the important of celebrating the small wins and the partial wins, and the deadening effect of the reflexive leftist habit to always stop to remind people that whatever today’s win is Isn’t Good Enough because it has not fully dismantled all oppression and brought us to anarchocommunist utopia (looking at you, all the people who rushed to publish relentlessly correct takes about how Zohran Mamdani’s primary win isn’t the revolution. WE KNOW, aren’t you exhausted with yourself yet?).
This book is part of a series called “anarchist interventions” and as such it pretty clearly is intended for anarchists, but I know plenty of non-anarchist socialists who have gotten value from this book and as a non-anarchist socialist I also think it’s a really worthwhile read. I think Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You still has my top spot for Most Important Reading About Not Being That Person In Meetings but this is still a really valuable addition to the conversation about how to do leftism that doesn’t suck. Now I’ve just got to come up with some really good discussion questions for Sunday.