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Title: Joyful Militancy Author: carla bergman and Nick Montgomery Date: 2017 Language: en Topics: joy, Spinoza, affect theory, subjection, conviviality, common notions, feminism, ressentiment, militancy, autonomy, ethics, affinity, morality, ideology, schooling, paranoid reading, Ivan Illich, Silvia Federici, Gustavo Esteva Source: AK Press
We’ve all heard so many conflicting words
About life, whether wrong or right
How you gotta be workin’ hard
And it ain’t no easy job
To survive. Just keep it alive
—Gil Scott-Heron, “Willing”
Like the moment when I first heard Gil Scott-Heron, I knew upon first
read that I would return to this book. The isolations of capitalism and
the despairs of facing Empire’s increasingly blatant yet always
insidious machinations, oppressions, and attacks will drive me to seek
the reminders that are here: of how to recognize my own moments of
rigidity, and of how to recognize—beside, within, and far from
me—moments of transformation. Though written by two white folks with
deeply different experiences than Gil—folks who crucially implicate not
just their privileges but also their behaviors—this book, like the song
“Willing” quoted above, offers the echoes of sparks that pull me through
lamentation towards reflection and action. Against the types of moments
that, within movements, can lead to a “loss of collective power,” both
song and book offer me images of radical folks engaged in outright and
everyday acts of resistance. They let me glance back, not nostalgically
but gladly, at the faces of folks in my own communities actively
supporting each other in radical friendships and lives whose resemblance
to mainstream representations of happiness is only cursory: because
there is a strength I see there that comes from—as carla bergman and
Nick Montgomery identify it—the type of joy that looks and feels like
growing more powerful together.
This book troubles the second line of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Willing,” a
song which, like much of his most powerful and resonant work, itself
carries an air of troubling. Joyful Militancy called me back to this
song and also through it because the project of this book is to move
beyond “wrong or right” into a space of ethical questioning that is
always already conflicting yet, while shifting, can also be strong
ground on which to build. As bergman and Montgomery identify in their
Introduction, “rigid radicalism” stifles productive tension and risk
taking by tending “towards mistrust and fixed ways of relating that
destroy the capacity to be responsive, creative, and experimental.” They
continue astutely, refusing to fix “joyful militancy” as an ideal,
thinking of it instead as “a fierce commitment to emergent forms of life
in the cracks of Empire, and the values, responsibilities, and questions
that sustain them.” The structure and focus of the book are both
attentive to moments of slippage and to regenerative practices. Because
of this, I recall again listening to Gil Scott-Heron. I am thinking now
of live versions of songs played with a full band that slip into and out
of long and beautiful minutes of improvisation, especially versions of
“The Bottle” in which Gil identifies the rhythm as Guan Guanco, “the
rhythm of rebirth and regeneration” that survived the middle passage, a
rhythm whose timing, like Gil's lyric tenacity from “The Revolution Will
Not Be Televised” through “The Bottle” to “Willing” and beyond, can be
troubling even as it cycles. One of the most powerful elements of Joyful
Militancy is its commitment to remaining ever troubled: because no
single program can give us the comfort of handing over to it the burdens
of the work itself; because to remain troubled is to sustain a space of
movement; because so many movements offer examples of a potential beauty
that is itself improvised and cyclical.
This book is about connections, about echoes. It is built, as “Willing”
is, on an acknowledgment of uninterrupted survival and resistance. In
choosing examples of movements and moments in which people offer
everyday and organized versions of joyful militancy, bergman and
Montgomery remind us that, despite all attempts to eradicate dissent,
despite genocides and pogroms and police attacks and surveillance and
micro-aggressions and the myriad ways in which we hurt each other, we
are uninterrupted. We are always already in conversation with movements
and moments of the past that were themselves about growing more powerful
together, having each others’ backs, resisting corrosive practices while
retrieving supportive ones, choosing to work and grow in friendships
less rusted by the imperatives of capitalism and Empire: “There are—and
there always have been—many places and spaces where alternatives are in
full bloom.”
Crucially, this book begins inside movement spaces, spaces in which
critiques of colonization, capitalism, and Empire already exist: bergman
and Montgomery are not set out to convince a non-radicalized audience of
the need to resist. Rather, combining rigor with accessibility, they
affirm the lineages and contemporary currents of radical thought and
practice they draw from while acknowledging the historical violences
that made and make them necessary. Echoing Rebecca Solnit, they state,
“Everyday life under Empire is already a certain kind of disaster.” In a
time when “anarchist” is treated by too many as an empty epithet, in a
time when the most vulnerable communities are being targeted with
cruelty, they openly state that “for joy to flourish, it needs sharp
edges.”
This book’s opening urge is to respond to the affective imperatives of
what the authors term rigid radicalism:
It is the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry
about not being radical enough; the sad comfort of sorting unfolding
events into dead categories; the vigilant perception of errors and
complicities in oneself and others; the anxious posturing on social
media and the highs of being liked and the lows of being ignored; the
suspicion and resentment felt in the presence of something new; the way
curiosity feels naïve and condescension feels right.
Affect is easily one of the more under-attended drivers of recent world
events beyond and within movements and it may also be among the most
crucial spaces of intervention. The description above reminds me of
despair, the despair I felt at times from Gil Scott-Heron that ached and
aches me the most. At times, Gil seems to despair that his audience does
not quite hear, does not quite grasp his message. It is precisely my own
potential for this specific type of despair that I feel bergman and
Montgomery help me combat, because it is a form of despair that is to
the benefit of Empire. It is a despair which, in my experience, leads to
isolation. When Gil passed on, friends, most of whom I had first met
through different movements and organizations, reached out. I
experienced a solidarity from them that was joyful in the sense of being
co-realized, even as I was steeped in grief at the loss of an ancestor.
As bergman and Montgomery note, “The self-enclosed individual is a
fiction of Empire, just like the State. ‘I’ am already a crowd, enmeshed
in others.”
More widely, in conversation and collaboration with friends, with folks
of divergent yet in-solidarity movements, they offer invocations instead
of correctives. The authors accurately declare that ancient ways of
growing more powerful together are always alive in the experiments of
our activisms and our lives. bergman and Montgomery have at the same
time a deep sense of how differences are necessary—of how specific
oppressions we have faced position us to question, to offer that which
other positions cannot—and of how our movements have built and can build
from the small overlaps and resonances, not just because we all carry
multiple identities but because certain common notions as well as
differences we hold can bring us to have each others’ backs.
bergman and Montgomery move by questions and attempts at response,
noting how “common notions can only be held gently, as flexible, living
ideas that are powerful in and through the relationships and processes
they sustain.” They converse with Black liberation, anti-violence,
queer, youth, anarchist, and Indigenous resurgence movements. Theirs is
something of a poetics: reminders and troublings of that which is always
already present, whether in terms of the rigid radicalism that so often
decays relationships within and between movements or in terms of
identifying, supporting and learning from moments and movements of
empowered and empowering resistance. They offer a reading and imagining
of empowerment that is Spinoza-inflected, anarchist-inflected,
solidarity-inflected joy. Noting their own process, they acknowledge,
“Neither of us could have written this book, or anything like it, alone.
And the collaboration has made us each more capable, in different ways,
together.”
As I write this, my love—after a morning drawing fists on butcher paper
to paste to placards—has gotten to her sister’s to help their mom with
caregiving for the babies. Her militancy, while divergent from the
politics of some of her family, is steeped in an ethic of invitation and
sharing that she learned from them and, right now, our niece is coloring
in a cutout of a brown fist almost as large as her. This is another
version of the troubled and beautiful messiness that bergman and
Montgomery remind me of in Joyful Militancy. I am thankful for it even
as I sit with my grief at the present political moment and my urge to
activate and be activated by those I love and those I’ve never met who,
though far, are never quite distant.
Dear Gil,
Lolo, thank you for offering me moments of militant experimentation and
troubled joy. For your work’s anticipation of the growth of
anti-apartheid solidarity with the people of South Africa. For when,
decades later, many took to social media to reach out to you and, still
willing in your final year of life, you heard their call and took up
anti-apartheid solidarity with the people of Palestine. For so many
moments that preceded them, moved between them, and followed
them—moments of insight, moments of despair, moments of joy. At times,
my most urgent desire is to feel untroubled. Thank you for divesting me
from it over and over. Here, Gil, are some words that trouble me and
offer me hope, some words that, like your words below, in shifting from
individual to collective, in invoking the work and joy of generations,
move me to tears: “For us at least, there is no cure, no gas mask, no
unitary solution: there are only openings, searchings, and the
collective discovery of new and old ways of moving that let in fresh
air. For the same reason that no one is immune, anyone can participate
in its undoing.”
Love,
Hari Alluri, on Kumeyaay land, January 20, 2017.
What my life really means is that the songs that I sing
Are just pieces of a dream that I’ve been building
And we can make a stand and hey, I’m reachin’ out my hand
’Cause I know damn well we can if we are willing
But we gotta be …
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
—Audre Lorde[1]
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring
explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive
about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints—such
people have a corpse in their mouth.
—Raoul Vaneigem[2]
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be a militant, even
though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
—Michel Foucault[3]
I
This book is an attempt to amplify some quiet conversations that have
been happening for a long time, about the connections between resisting
and thriving, about how we relate to each other in radical movements
today, and about some of the barriers to collective transformation.
There is something that circulates in many radical movements and spaces,
draining away their transformative potential. Anyone who has frequented
these spaces has felt it. Many (including us) have actively participated
in it, spread it, and been hurt by it. It nurtures rigidity, mistrust,
and anxiety precisely where we are supposed to feel most alive. It
compels us to search ourselves and others ruthlessly for flaws and
inconsistencies. It crushes experimentation and curiosity. It is hostile
to difference, complexity, and nuance. Or it is the most complex, the
most nuanced, and everyone else is simplistic and stupid. Radicalism
becomes an ideal and everyone becomes deficient in comparison.
The anxious posturing, the vigilant search for mistakes and limitations,
the hostility that crushes a hesitant new idea, the way that critique
becomes a reflex, the sense that things are urgent yet pointless, the
circulation of the latest article tearing apart bad habits and
behaviors, the way shaming others becomes comfortable, the ceaseless
generation of necessities and duties, the sense of feeling guilty about
one’s own fear and loneliness, the clash of political views that
requires a winner and a loser, the performance of anti-oppressive
language, the way that some stare at the floor or look at the door. We
know these tendencies, intimately. We have seen them circulating, and
felt them pass through us.
When we began talking with friends about this, there were immediate head
nods, and sometimes excited eruptions—“YES! Finally someone is going to
talk about this publicly!” No one knew exactly what it was or where it
came from, but many knew exactly what we were talking about. Like us,
they had felt it and participated in it. They had discussed it quietly
and carefully with people they trusted. But it was hard to unpack, for a
whole bunch of reasons. To complain or criticize it came with the risk
of being attacked, shamed, or cast out. This phenomenon is difficult to
talk about because it presents itself as the most radical, the most
anti-oppressive, the most militant. It shape-shifts and multiplies
itself: sometimes it appears as one rigid line, at other times as a
proliferation of positions, arrayed against each other. How is it that
explicitly radical, anti-oppressive, or anti-authoritarian spaces—the
places where people should feel most alive and powerful—can sometimes
feel cold, stifling, and rigid? What contributes to a climate in which
one is never radical enough, where we have to continually prove our
radicalness to others? What makes insecurity, distrust, anxiety, guilt,
and shame so pervasive? Where does all this come from? What is this
thing? Is it one thing, or many? What activates it, stokes it, and how
can it be warded off?
We are not the first to try to get ahold of this phenomenon. It has gone
by many names—sad militancy, grumpywarriorcool, manarchism,
puritanism—each of which emphasizes different elements and sources. In
this book, we call it rigid radicalism. Our research and experience lead
us to think that its origins are as diverse as the phenomenon itself.
Some say rigid radicalism comes from the way heteropatriarchy poisons
intimacy with trauma and violence, while separating politics from
everyday life. Others point to origins in the narcissistic and
guilt-ridden individualism nurtured by whiteness. Or it is the way
schooling replaces creativity and curiosity with conformity and
evaluation. Or the humiliation of a life organized by capitalism, in
which we are all pitted in petty competitions with each other. Or the
way cynicism evolves from attempts to avoid pain and failure. Or it is
identity politics fused with neoliberalism. And the terror and anxiety
of a world in crisis. And the weakening of movements and a decline in
militancy. Or it is the existence of radical milieus as such. And the
deep insecurity nurtured by social media and its injunction to public
performance. Or it is morality, or ideology, or the Left, or the
Maoists, or the nihilists, or the moralists, or the ghost of Lenin.
Probably there is some truth to all of these: it is definitely a tangled
web.
It is important to say, from the outset, that we do not think the
problem is simply anger, conflict, or difference. Whenever people name
and challenge oppression and violence, there are almost always
reactionaries telling them they are doing it wrong, that they need to be
polite, nice, reasonable, peaceful, or patient. We want nothing to do
with attempts to regulate resistance.
For this reason, we do not believe rigid radicalism can be countered by
inventing a new set of norms for how to behave, or setting out a new
ideal of what radicalism should be. There can be no instructions. This
would just create a new ideal to measure ourselves against. It would
just add to a long list of shoulds, dos, and don’ts that reactivates the
problem. We hope to help undo tendencies towards regulation and
policing, rather than playing into them.
Maybe we are stoking rigid radicalism right now, in writing about it.
Searching out its roots and inner workings can recreate a stifling
atmosphere where we feel like we are stuck, always lacking, always
messing up, with no escape. Pointing to shame, rigidity, guilt,
competition, or anxiety does not make them go away, and might make
things worse. It is not a question of revealing the fact that we don’t
treat each other well sometimes, or that movements can turn in on
themselves; we know this already. These tendencies are a public secret:
widely known, but difficult to talk about.[4] Tracing origins might not
tell us much about what to do here and now. It is not about a few bad
apples, or a few bad behaviors. For us at least, it cannot be reduced to
those people over there, because we feel it arise in ourselves as well.
There is no way to purify our movements of these tendencies, because the
desire for purity is part of the problem.
So our project is not about being against rigid radicalism. We have
become convinced that rigid radicalism cannot be countered by critique
alone. Our critique and interrogation are a way of asking: how can we be
otherwise? What makes it possible to activate something different? How
to protect the something different once it gains traction? How to share
experiences of places and spaces where something different is already
taking place—where people feel more alive and capable?
The first step, for us, has been to affirm that we are already
otherwise: we all have parts of ourselves that are drawn towards other
ways of being. Everyone has glimmers, at least, of the ways that
fierceness can be intertwined with kindness, and curiosity with
transformation. Every space is a complex ecology of different
tendencies. Rigid radicalism is always only one tendency among others.
There are—and always have been—many places and spaces where alternatives
are in full bloom. Beyond merely diagnosing or combating rigid
radicalism, we seek to affirm the multiplicity of ways that spaces can
be otherwise.
This is part of what we have been talking about with people: What makes
radical spaces and movements feel transformative and creative, rather
than dogmatic, rule-bound, or stifling? What sustains struggles, spaces,
and forms of life where we become capable of living and fighting in new
ways? What supports people’s capacities to challenge each other and undo
deeply ingrained habits, rather than just saying the “right” thing or
avoiding the “wrong” thing? How are people carving out relationships
based in trust, love, and responsibility amid the violence that
permeates daily life? What sustains these worlds—what makes them thrive?
With so much destruction in motion, this might all sound naïve to some
readers: why speak of thriving and love when there are so many massive,
urgent problems that need to be confronted? To write about the potential
of trust and care, at this time in history, could seem like grasping
optimistically at straws as the world burns. But durable bonds and new
complicities are not a reprieve or an escape; they are the very means of
undoing Empire.
We use “Empire” to name the organized destruction under which we live.
Through its attempt to render everything profitable and controllable,
Empire administers a war with other forms of life. The rhythms it
imposes are at once absorptive and isolating. Even when this war takes
the apparently subtle forms of assimilation and control, it is backed by
brutal violence. Prisons and cops lurk alongside discourses of inclusion
and tolerance. Empire works to monopolize the whole field of life,
crushing autonomy and inducing dependence.
At the same time, there are cracks everywhere. A basic premise of this
book is that resistance and transformation are always in the making at
the margins, while Empire is always adapting and reacting. All of its
mechanisms of control have been invented as responses to the constant
upwelling of resistance, autonomy, and insurrection. This upwelling is a
struggle not only against external domination, but against Empire’s
control over identities, desires, and relationships. Undoing Empire also
means undoing oneself. This is never a purely negative undoing, because
it also means becoming capable of something new.
We are convinced that what is needed is an activation and affirmation of
other ways of being. Not a new norm, but the exploration of new (and
old) capacities. This book explores some of these capacities alongside
the ways that people are transforming their own situations without
governments or hierarchical institutions. The capacity to treat each
other well is connected, we think, to movements that nurture autonomy,
trust, responsibility, and the collective power that is palpable when
people are able to participate more fully in life. Amidst and beyond
barricades and Molotovs there are new forms of care and belonging, quiet
and humble forms of support. There are emergent sensibilities based in
listening, curiosity, and experimentation. There are reconnections with
subjugated traditions and practices. There is hatred of the forces that
threaten all this, and a willingness to fight. Some have been nurturing
these capacities for a long time; others are just beginning to explore
them. For this reason, rather than just dwelling in the pervasiveness of
rigid radicalism or Empire, here we are exploring, celebrating, and
connecting with other ways of being—other thriving forms of resistance
and struggle.
In many currents of radicalism—especially certain strains of
Marxism—radical theory tasks itself with directing the course of
struggle, pointing the way forward, or handing down instructions and
fixed ways of being. This kind of theory generates necessities or
suggestions to be implemented. Theory directs practice. Either this, or
theory is tasked with critique of the world, of practice, and of other
theories: it is supposed to reveal the limits of current struggles,
discover the mistakes and flawed ways of doing or thinking, or reveal
the root of oppression. Often, both these modes of theory generate
positions defined in opposition to others. They give us things to be for
or against.
But there are other modes of theory. Theory can also explore connections
and ask open-ended questions. It can affirm and elaborate on something
people already intuit or sense. It can celebrate and inspire, it can
move. We want a kind of theory that participates in struggle and the
growth of shared power, rather than directing it or evaluating it from
outside. We are after a kind of theory that is critical but also
affirmative. Rather than pointing to the limits or shortcomings of
movements and declaring what they should do, affirmative theory hones in
on the most transformative edges and margins.
In writing this book, we’ve been influenced by many divergent voices and
movements, and we want to value them all. We combine weighty
philosophical concepts with conversations, and draw on zines, academic
articles and books, speeches, and interviews. Furthermore, we think
there’s a lot to be said for bringing things together in unforeseen ways
that might intensify their aliveness and dynamism. This entails asking
and provoking questions, many of which we leave open and unresolved
throughout the book. For us, the most compelling questions are those
that can be answered in a multiplicity of ways, in different situations.
One of our basic premises is that transformative potentials are always
already present and emergent. Not only can things be otherwise; they
already are, and it is a matter of tuning, tending, activating,
connecting, and defending these processes of change that are already in
the making. People are always enacting alternatives to the dominant
order of things, however small, and there are always new connections and
potentials to explore. We see this kind of sensibility happening in
currents of feminism, queer theory, Black liberation, Indigenous
resurgence, youth liberation, anarchism, autonomism, and radical
ecology, among others, and we seek to affirm these movements and
practices throughout the book.
But this is tricky: how are we to affirm and explore spaces where
something transformative is taking place without holding them up as
ideals to imitate, or telling others to be a certain way? What we are
after is not a new critique or new position, but a process. Not a new
direction for movements, but the process of movement itself, and the
growth of creativity, struggle, experimentation, and collective power.
To reduce these problems to a complete and final analysis would be to
miss the point. The best thing would be an informal discussion capable
of bringing about the subtle magic of wordplay.
It is a real contradiction to talk of joy seriously.
—Alfredo Bonanno[5]
Pursuing these questions took us on a long detour through a minor
current of Western philosophy associated with Baruch Spinoza. Against
the grain of European thought that sought to subdue life through rigid
dualisms and classifications, Spinoza conceptualized a world in which
everything is interconnected and in process.
This worldview meant that Spinoza was despised by most of his
contemporaries, but his ideas have influenced numerous currents of
radical theory and practice, including anarchism, autonomous Marxism,
affect theory, deep ecology, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, queer
theory, and even neuroscience. We are drawing on a current that runs
from Spinoza through Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Landauer, Michel
Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze to contemporary radicals like the Invisible
Committee, Colectivo Situaciones, Lauren Berlant, Michael Hardt, and
Antonio Negri. What we have found exciting about this current is the
focus on processes through which people become more alive, more capable,
and more powerful together. For Spinoza, the whole point of life is to
become capable of new things, with others. His name for this process is
joy.
Joy? What? Doesn’t joy just mean happiness, with some vaguely Christian
undertones? Later we’ll be more precise about joy, but for now we want
to be clear that it is not the same thing as happiness. A joyful process
of transformation might involve happiness, but it tends to entail a
whole range of feelings at once: it might feel overwhelming, painful,
dramatic and world-shaking, or subtle and uncanny. Joy rarely feels
comfortable or easy, because it transforms and reorients people and
relationships. Rather than the desire to exploit, control, and direct
others, it is resonant with emergent and collective capacities to do
things, make things, undo painful habits, and nurture enabling ways of
being together.[6]
Moreover, Spinoza’s concept of joy is not an emotion at all, but an
increase in one’s power to affect and be affected. It is the capacity to
do and feel more. As such, it is connected to creativity and the embrace
of uncertainty. Within the Spinozan current, there is no way to
determine what is right and good for everyone. It is not a moral
philosophy, with a fixed idea of good and evil. There is no recipe for
life or struggle. There is no framework that works in all places, at all
times. What is transformative in one context might be useless or
stifling in another. What worked once might become stale, or, on the
other hand, the recovery of old memories and traditions might be
enlivening. So does this mean anything goes? People just do what they
want? Rejecting universal arbiters like morality and the state doesn’t
mean falling into “chaos” or “total relativity.” The space beyond fixed
and established orders, structures, and morals is not one of disorder:
it is the space of emergent orders, values, and forms of life.
When people come into contact with their own power—with their capacity
to participate in something life-giving—they often become more militant.
Militancy is a loaded word for some, evoking images of machismo and
militarism. For us, militancy means combativeness and a willingness to
fight, but fighting might look like a lot of different things. It might
mean the struggle against internalized shame and oppression; fierce
support for a friend or loved one; the courage to sit with trauma; a
quiet act of sabotage; the persistence to recover subjugated traditions;
drawing lines in the sand; or simply the willingness to risk. We are
intentionally bringing joy and militancy together, with the aim of
thinking through the connections between fierceness and love, resistance
and care, combativeness and nurturance.
When people find themselves genuinely supported and cared for, they are
able to extend this to others in ways that seemed impossible or
terrifying before. When people find their bellies filled and their minds
sharpened among communal kitchens and libraries, hatred for capitalist
ways of life grows amid belonging and connection. When someone receives
comfort and support from friends, they find themselves willing to
confront the abuse they have been facing. When people develop or recover
a connection to the places where they live, they may find themselves
standing in front of bulldozers to protect that place. When people begin
to meet their everyday needs through neighborhood assemblies and mutual
aid, all of a sudden they are willing to fight the police, and the fight
deepens bonds of trust and solidarity. Joy can be contagious and
dangerous.
All over the world, there are stories of people who find themselves
transformed through the creation of other forms of life: more capable,
more alive, and more connected to each other, and willing to defend what
they are building. In our conversations with others from a variety of
currents and locations, we have become increasingly convinced that the
most widespread, long-lasting, and fierce struggles are animated by
strong relationships of love, care, and trust. These values are not
fixed duties that can be imitated, nor do they come out of thin air.
They arise from struggles through which people become powerful together.
As people force Empire out of their lives, there is more space for
kindness and solidarity. As people reduce their dependence on Empire’s
stifling institutions, collective responsibility and autonomy can grow.
As people come to trust their capacity to figure things out together
rather than relying on the state and capitalism, they are less willing
to submit to the fears and divisions that Empire fosters.
These emergent powers are at the core of the Spinozan lineage, of this
book, and (we think) of many vibrant movements today. Drawing on
Spinoza, we call them common notions. To have a common notion is to be
able to participate more fully in the web of relations and affections in
which we are enmeshed. They are not about controlling things, but about
response-ability, capacities to remain responsive to changing
situations. This is why they are a bit paradoxical: they are material
ideas, accessed by tuning into the forces that compose us, inseparable
from the feelings and practices that animate them. Abstract morality and
ideology are barriers to this tuning-in, offering up rule-bound
frameworks that close us off from the capacity to modulate the forces of
the present moment.
Similarly, we have come to think that while trust is fundamental in
transformative struggle, it cannot be an obligation; trust is always a
gift and a risk. Common notions are inherently experimental and
collective. They subsist by hanging onto uncertainty, similar to the
Zapatistas’ notion preguntando caminamos: “asking, we walk.” For the
same reason, common notions are always in danger of being stifled by
rigid radicalism, which tends towards mistrust and fixed ways of
relating that destroy the capacity to be responsive and inventive.
Joyful militancy, then, is a fierce commitment to emergent forms of life
in the cracks of Empire, and the values, responsibilities, and questions
that sustain them.
II
While we want to insist that there are potentials bubbling up
everywhere, it doesn’t always feel that way. This is not an optimistic
book. We are not interested in sacrificing the present for a revolution
in the distance, nor are we confident that things will get better. They
may get worse, for many of us, in many ways. However, we are equally
wary of pessimism and cynicism. Among others, feminist essayist Rebecca
Solnit has taught us to see optimism and pessimism as two sides of the
same coin: both try to remove uncertainty from the world. Both foster
certitude about how things will turn out, whether good or bad. Optimism
and pessimism can provide a sense of comfort at the expense of openness
and the capacity to hang onto complexity. They can drain away our
capacity to care, to try, and to fight for things to be otherwise
without knowing how it will turn out. A fundamental premise of this book
is that no matter what, things can be otherwise—there is always wiggle
room, Empire is already full of cracks, and the future is always
uncertain. Uncertainty is where we need to begin, because
experimentation and curiosity is part of what has been stolen from us.
Empire works in part by making us feel impotent, corroding our abilities
to shape worlds together.
In this book we hope to affirm a diverse array of struggles and
alternatives in the making, including prison abolition and
transformative justice, feminism and anti-violence, youth liberation,
and Indigenous resurgence and land defense, among others. This kind of
connection is less about adding up movements as if they could be
unified, and more about illustrating the productiveness of their
difference; like combining different tones and rhythms to see how they
resonate.
To think and feel through this process, rather than creating new norms
or positions, may be frustrating for some readers. It might sound a bit
fluffy to insist that experimentation and struggle go hand in hand, or
that celebration and love are linked to militant resistance. They aren’t
always connected. Yet creativity and experimentation are vital in the
face of forces that not only crush disobedience but also steer desires.
We want to affirm the ways that creative destruction and combative
resistance can be linked to walking with questions, and all of this can
make us more alive and capable together. Joyful militancy is a
dangerous, transformative, and experimental process, generated
collectively and held gently.
“Q: if an anarcho-syndicalist, an insurrectionary anarchist, and an
anarcho-primitivist are sitting together in the back of a car, who’s
driving?
A: A cop!”
This book is also an intervention into anti-authoritarian movements,
especially anarchism. Many threads of anarchism infuse our lives and the
lives of those we care about, and we have been inspired and influenced
by a range of different anti-authoritarian currents. At its most
vibrant, anarchism is not an ideology, but a creative rejection of the
ideologies of the state, capitalism, and the Left. Crucial to anarchism
is the attempt to escape the certainties of Empire and the certainties
that can arise in struggle. Anarchism can support a trust in people’s
capacities to figure out for themselves how to live and fight together,
rather than constructing a model or blueprint for resistance. Whereas
dominant currents of Marxism and liberalism assume the necessity of the
state and activate desires for unity and sameness, anarchism often
nurtures autonomy, decentralization, and difference.
The anarchism we are interested in does not tell us what we should do.
For us this is crucial. Anarchism can help us inhabit spaces by trusting
our own capacities, and relating in ways that are emergent and
responsive to change. But as with any other tradition, anarchism can
also crystallize into a fixed ideology. It can produce closed and
stifling milieus. It can lead to duty-bound collectivism, or simplistic
individualism. It can feel like a club whose boundaries are policed, or
a badge to display one’s radical cred. Anarchist spaces can feel cold,
unwelcoming, and scary. Anyone familiar with anarchist milieus knows
that there can be vicious sectarian conflicts, which often entrench
rigid loyalties and positions.
We do not focus much on these debates here, nor do we situate ourselves
as particular types of anarchists. This is partly because we have
learned from many different currents, and it seems counterproductive to
elevate one above the others. We also want to avoid some of the debates
that, to us, have become sedimented and stale. At its best, we think
anarchism nurtures trust in people’s capacity to figure things out,
while also supporting autonomy and leaving room for conflict. We are
inspired by all the ways that anarchists are able to inhabit situations
with strong values and fierce care, while also respecting and even
welcoming difference.
We are particularly interested in currents of anarchism and
anti-authoritarianism that have emphasized the importance of affinities
over ideologies. Affinity is a helpful concept for us because it speaks
to emergent relationships and forms of organizing that are decentralized
and flexible, but not flimsy. Organizing by affinity basically means
seeking out and nurturing relationships based in shared values,
commitments, and passions, without trying to impose those on everyone
else. Affinity is also important because many of the currents that
inspire us either reject anarchism—along with all other “isms”—or just
don’t have much interest in it. Some of the people we interviewed are
self-proclaimed anarchists who are known in anarchist milieus. Others
have been deeply influenced by anarchism, and it inflects their projects
and their lives, but they don’t identify much with the political label.
Others have traditions of autonomy and resistance that come from other
sources, including Indigeneity and other non-Western traditions. For
many, resistance to hierarchy, violence, and exploitation has been
something intuitive, or a question of survival. They are forcing Empire
out of their lives and linking up with others doing the same.
There is a conversation going on, within and beyond anarchism, about the
potential of strong relationships that are rooted in trust, love, care,
and the capacity to support and defend each other. The most exciting
currents of anarchism, for us, are those that encourage and enable
people to live differently here and now, and to break down divides
between organizing and everyday life.
How can these processes of transformation be nurtured and defended, not
just in their most dramatic and exceptional moments, but all the time?
Are there common values or sensibilities that nurture transformative
relationships, alive and responsive to changing situations, while
warding off both Empire and rigid radicalism? What if joy (as the
process of becoming more capable) was seen as fundamental to undoing
Empire? What would it mean to be militant about joy? What is militancy
when it is infused with creativity and love?
It was with these questions—much vaguer and more muddled at the
time—that the two of us began having intentional conversations with
several others. And who are we, the two of us? Both of us live in
so-called British Columbia, Canada—Nick in Victoria and carla in
Vancouver. We come from different generations, and we have pretty
different life experiences across gender, class, ability, and education.
carla has been involved in deschooling, youth liberation organizing, and
other radical currents for a couple of decades now, and she became a
mentor to Nick several years ago as Nick was realizing that he was a
radical in his mid twenties without many mentors from older generations
(a common phenomenon in anarchist and other radical worlds). What began
as a relationship of mentorship and political collaboration evolved into
a deep friendship. In terms of our organizing, we are both oriented
towards prefigurative experiments: trying to contribute to projects and
forms of life where we are able to live and relate differently with
others, here and now, and supporting others doing the same. Both of us
are white cis-gendered settlers, and for us this has meant trying to
write in conversation with people with very different life experiences
and insights, including Indigenous people, kids and youth, Black people
and other folks of color, and genderqueer and trans folks, all of whom
struggle against forms of violence and oppression that we can never
know. We have also sought to talk to people from a wide variety of
movements in many different places throughout Turtle Island (North
America) and Latin America.
Over the course of a year and a half we spoke with friends, and friends
of friends. This was a unique research process, in part, because we were
inviting people into an ongoing conversation, asking them to reflect on
and respond to our continually evolving ideas about joyful militancy and
rigid radicalism. We formally interviewed fifteen people in all: Silvia
Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Kelsey
Cham C., Zainab Amadahy, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Melanie Matining,
Tasnim Nathoo, Sebastian Touza, Walidah Imarisha, Mik Turje, Margaret
Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, and Richard Day. We also had many more informal
conversations with folks from a lot of different backgrounds, of all
ages, who impacted our thinking immensely.
These people are not representatives of any particular group or
movement. Nor are we holding them up as the ultimate embodiment of joy,
militancy, or radicalism. They are people with whom we share values and
who inspire and challenge us. All of them are committed, in various
ways, to forcing Empire out of their lives and reviving and nurturing
other worlds. They are involved in a diversity of movements, struggles,
and forms of life: the uprisings in Oaxaca and Argentina; small-scale
farming and urban food justice; Black liberation and prison abolition;
Indigenous resurgence and land defense; transformative and healing
justice movements; radical ecology and permaculture; scavenging and
squatting; youth liberation and deschooling; feminist and anti-violence
work; the creation of autonomous, queer, BIPOC[*] spaces; direct action
and anticapitalist organizing, and much more, including the beautiful
and fierce ways of being that are difficult to capture in words.
Experiences among the people we interviewed ranged widely, from
long-term commitments to places and communities to more itinerant and
scattered spaces of belonging; from being steeped in radical theory to
forms of knowledge arising through lived experience; from being well
known in radical circles to being known primarily among friends, loved
ones, and close collaborators.
Some we interviewed in person, some over conference calls, and others
through written correspondence. We have tried to show this
conversation—and to keep it going—by including extended excerpts from
some of the interviews, putting them in dialogue with our own ideas and
with each other. Some people we interviewed were unequivocally
enthusiastic about this notion of joyful militancy, offering
encouragement and affirmation. Others were more critical, alerting us to
dangers, shortcomings, and confusions, and challenging some of our
ideas. We have tried to show some of the ways our interlocutors
challenged and disagreed with us—and diverged from each other—without
pitting anyone against each other in a simplistic way.
We learned a lot from the apprehensiveness of some of the Indigenous
people and people of color we interviewed, whose emotions are constantly
policed and regulated, and whose struggles are constantly appropriated
or erased. We heard from them that centering things like kindness, love,
trust, and flourishing—especially when it comes from white people like
us—can erase power relations. It can end up pathologizing so-called
“negative” emotions like fear, mistrust, resentment, and anger. It can
legitimize tone policing and a reactionary defense of comfort. It can
fall into simplistic commandments to “be nice” or “get over” oppression
and violence. Similarly, pointing to the importance of trust and
openness can be dangerous and irresponsible in a world of so much
betrayal and violence. These misgivings have taught us to be clear that
trust and vulnerability are powerful and irreducibly risky; they require
boundaries. They can never be obligations or duties.
We have also found that Spinoza’s concept of sadness can be very
misleading. In contrast to joy, it means the reduction of one’s
capacities to affect and be affected. Initially, we had been calling
rigid radicalism “sad militancy,” drawing on others in the Spinozan
current.[7] But while the concept of sad militancy was immediately
intuitive for some, for others it was frustrating because of its
resonance with grief and sorrow, which are an irreducible part of life
and struggle. Interpreted in this light, it could be seen as belittling
grief and pain. For that reason, we have decentered the concept of
sadness in this book, while trying to hang onto what Spinoza was getting
at. In its place, we often use words like stagnation, rigidity, and
depletion, connoting a loss of collective power and the way Empire and
rigid radicalism keep us stuck there. With joyful militancy we are
trying to get at a multiplicity of transformations and worlds in motion,
but there is a danger of implying that we are all in the same situation,
and erasing difference and antagonisms. BIPOC women, trans, queer, and
Two-Spirit people, in particular, have worked hard to show the
specificities of the oppression they face and the specificity of their
resistance and the worlds they are making.
In the face of this, we have mostly questions and tentative ideas: can
joyful militancy affirm and explore a multiplicity of struggles and
forms of life without homogenizing them? By attuning us to
open-endedness of situations, can joy help us undo some of the
universalizing and colonizing tendencies of radical Western theory and
practice? Can movements be explored in ways that enable mutual learning
and transformation, rather than erasing difference?
Here, we want to return to the dynamic space beyond fixed norms on the
one hand, and “anything goes” relativism on the other. Outside this
false dichotomy is the domain of relationships that are alive,
responsive, and make people capable of new things together, without
imposing this on everyone else. It is in this space where values like
openness, curiosity, trust, and responsibility can really flourish, not
as fixed ways of being to be applied everywhere, but as ways of relating
that can only be kept alive by cultivating careful, selective, and
fierce boundaries. For joy to flourish, it needs sharp edges.
How do we know when to be open and vulnerable, and when to draw lines in
the sand and fight? Who to trust, and how? When are relationships worth
fighting for, and when do they need to be abandoned? These are not
questions with pre-given answers; they can only be answered over and
over again in a multiplicity of ways. A crucial outgrowth of joy and
fidelity to it, we suggest, is that people will take different paths and
have different priorities. Movements and forms of life will diverge and
sometimes come into conflict. There is no trump card that can be used to
dictate a path to others: not the state, not morality, and not strategic
imperatives of unity or movement-building. Encountering difference might
lead to new capacities, strong bonds, and new forms of struggle. Or it
might be more ambivalent and difficult, mixing distance and closeness.
Or it might mean being told to fuck off. For all these reasons, we try
to share some of our own values, and some of the struggles and movements
that deeply inspire us, without saying that they are right for everyone
or that others should share our priorities.
This book is laid out in five core chapters. Each chapter looks at
Empire from a different perspective, showing how it is being undone at
the edges and cracks. Chapter 1 suggests that, increasingly, Empire
works through subjection and the accumulation of powerlessness. Backed
by violence, its promises of happiness work like an anesthetic, closing
subjects off from transformation. Joy is the growth of an embodied
thinking and doing that undoes this stifling subjection.
In Chapter 2 we look at how Empire maintains its hold through morality
and toxic relationships. As an alternative to the false choice between
duty-bound moralism or isolated individualism, we recover a conception
of relational ethics from the Spinozan current. In conversation with
others, we use this relational ethics to think through the potentials
and pitfalls of alliances across the settler colonial divide and other
forms of oppression, suggesting that Empire’s hold is undone by
selective openness, fierce boundaries, and new and old forms of kinship
and friendship.
We deepen this relational ethics in Chapter 3, arguing that joyful
militancy is sustained by emergent values—common notions—of trust and
responsibility. We suggest that these capacities have been stolen from
us by forced dependence on Empire’s infrastructures and institutions,
which monopolize the ways we live and die together. Drawing on stories
from transformative justice, youth liberation, and Indigenous
resurgence, we look at some of the ways people are able to undo this
dependence and figure things out together.
Chapters 4 and 5 track the ways that Empire has seeped into radical
movements and spaces. Attempts to root out Empire have paradoxically
fueled some of its most debilitating tendencies, including suspicion,
moralism, rigidity, and shame, turning radical politics into a
competitive performance rather than a shared and enabling process. In
Chapter 5 we tell three tangled stories about the historical emergence
of rigid radicalism, looking at the way ideology has permeated Marxism,
anarchism, and other movements; how schooling has promoted a paranoid
search for flaws and limitations; and how moralism crops up in radical
spaces, leading to guilt, shame, and puritanism. In each of these
stories, we try to show how rigid radicalism is constantly being undone
and warded off by other ways of being, ethical responsiveness, strong
relationships, and common notions.
Ultimately, we want joyful militancy to be about questions and
curiosity, not fixed answers or instructions. In this spirit we hope
that this book contributes to ongoing conversations, and that it
supports people in figuring out for themselves what thriving resistance
looks like, and how rigidity and stagnation can be warded off.
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or
it can be thrown through the window.
—Brian Massumi[8]
Personally, I want to be nurturing life when I go down in struggle. I
want nurturing life to BE my struggle.
—Zainab Amadahy[9]
Anyone who has been transformed through a struggle can attest to its
power to open up more capacities for resistance, creativity, action, and
vision. This sense of collective power—the sense that things are
different, that we are different, that a more capable “we” is forming
that didn’t exist before—is what we mean by joyful transformation.
Joyful transformation entails a new conception of militancy, which is
already emerging in many movements today. To be militant about joy means
being attuned to situations or relationships, and learning how to
participate in and support the transformation, rather than directing or
controlling it.
Everywhere, people are recovering, sustaining, and reinventing worlds
that are more intense and alive than the form of life offered up by
Empire. The web of control that exploits and administers life—ranging
from the most brutal forms of domination to the subtlest inculcation of
anxiety and isolation—is what we call Empire. It includes the
interlocking systems of settler colonialism, white supremacy, the state,
capitalism, ableism, ageism, and heteropatriarchy. Using one word to
encapsulate all of this is risky because it can end up turning Empire
into a static thing, when in fact it is a complex set of processes.
These processes separate people from their power, their creativity, and
their ability to connect with each other and their worlds.
We say worlds, in the plural, because part of Empire’s power is to bring
us all into the same world, with one morality, one history, and one
direction, and to convert differences into hierarchical, violent
divisions. As other worlds emerge through resistance and transformation,
they reveal more of the violence of Empire. Insurrections and revolts on
the street reveal that the police are an armed gang and that “keeping
the peace” is war by other means. Pushing back against sexualized
violence reveals the ways that rape culture continues to structure daily
life. Indigenous resurgence reveals the persistent concreteness of
settler colonial occupation and the charade of apologizing for genocide
and dispossession as if they were only part of the past. Holding
assemblies where people can formulate problems together, make decisions
collectively, and care for one another reveals the profound alienation
and individualism of life under Empire. Trying to raise kids (or even
share space with them) without controlling them reveals the ways that
ageism and schooling stifle young people and segregate generations.
Struggles against anti-Black racism and white supremacy reveal the
continuities between slavery, apartheid, and mass incarceration, in
which slave catchers have evolved into police and plantations have
shaped prisons. The movements of migrants reveal the interconnected
violence of borders, imperialism, and citizenship. And the constant
resistance to capitalism, even when fleeting, reveals the subordination,
humiliation, and exploitation required by capital. As these struggles
connect and resonate, Empire’s precarity is being revealed everywhere,
even if it continues to be pervasive and devastating.
There is no doubt that we live in a world of intertwined horrors.
Borders tighten around bodies as capital flows ever more freely;
corporations suck lakes dry to sell bottled water; debt proliferates as
a tool of control and dispossession; governments and corporations attack
Indigenous lands and bodies while announcing state-controlled
recognition and reconciliation initiatives; surveillance is increasingly
ubiquitous; addiction, depression and anxiety proliferate along with new
drugs to keep bodies working; gentrification tears apart neighborhoods
to make way for glassy condos; people remain tethered to jobs they hate;
the whole world is becoming toxic; bombs are dropped by drones
controlled by soldiers at a distant computer console; a coded discourse
of criminality constructs Black bodies as threats, targeting them with
murder and imprisonment; climatic and ecological catastrophes intensify
as world leaders debate emissions targets; more of us depend on food and
gadgets made half a world away under brutal conditions; we are
encouraged to spend more time touching our screens than the people we
love; it is easier for many of us to envision the end of the world than
the end of capitalism.[10]
We suspect that anyone reading this already knows and feels this horror
in one way or another. When we say that struggles reveal the violence of
Empire, it’s not that everyone was unaware of it before. However,
upwellings of resistance and insurrection make this knowing palpable in
ways that compel responses. In this sense, it is not that people first
figure out how oppression works, then are able to organize or resist.
Rather it is resistance, struggle, and lived transformation that make it
possible to feel collective power and carve out new paths.
No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a
certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this
perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.
—Deleuze and Guattari[11]
In order to rule, those in positions of power need to constantly crush
and subdue the forces of transformation. They do not merely need
obedience; they need their subjects to be separated from their own
capacities. As Audre Lorde writes, “Every oppression must corrupt or
distort those various sources of power within the culture of the
oppressed that can provide energy for change.”[12] Empire’s hold is
increasingly affective: it suffuses our emotions, relationships, and
desires, propagating feelings of shame, impotence, fear, and dependence.
It makes capitalist relations feel inevitable and (to some) even
desirable.
An important insight shared by many radical currents is that these forms
of violence and control are ultimately toxic for everyone. For men to
“enjoy” the benefits of patriarchal masculinity, their capacities for
vulnerability and care must be eviscerated, replaced by a violent and
disconnected way of being built upon shame and woundedness. For white
people to become white, they have to internalize entitlement and a
hostility to difference, hiding from the ways their lives depend on
institutionalized violence and exploitation. Settlers must build their
lives on a living legacy of genocide, indebted to ongoing extraction and
dispossession. Being privileged by Empire means being sheltered from its
most extreme forms of violence and degradation, and to be enrolled in a
stultifying form of life that recreates this violence. Most of what is
called privilege has nothing to do with thriving or joy; this is why
privileged white men are some of the most emotionally stunted,
closed-off people alive today. None of this is to deny that there are
pleasures, wealth, and safety associated with whiteness,
heteropatriarchal masculinity, and other forms of privilege. Instead, it
is to insist that everyone, potentially, has a stake in undoing
privileges—and the ongoing violence required to secure them—as a part of
transformative struggle. As Jack Halberstam writes in his introduction
to Fred Moten’s The Undercommons,
The mission then for the denizens of the undercommons is to recognize
that when you seek to make things better, you are not just doing it for
the Other, you must also be doing it for yourself. While men may think
they are being “sensitive” by turning to feminism, while white people
may think they are being right on by opposing racism, no one will really
be able to embrace the mission of tearing “this shit down” until they
realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us,
they are bad for all of us. Gender hierarchies are bad for men as well
as women and they are really bad for the rest of us. Racial hierarchies
are not rational and ordered, they are chaotic and nonsensical and must
be opposed by precisely all those who benefit in any way from them. Or,
as Moten puts it: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that
it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized
that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to
recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly,
you stupid motherfucker, you know?”[13]
Empire is killing all of us, in different ways, and all of us, in
different ways, are marked by incredible legacies of movement and
revolt. Its forms of control are never total, never guaranteed. The word
“sabotage” comes from those who destroyed factory machinery by throwing
their wooden shoes (sabots) in the gears of the early European
factories. Slaves broke their tools in the field, poisoned their
masters, learned to read in secret, and invented subversive forms of
song and dance.
Empire reacts to resistance by entrenching and accumulating what Spinoza
called sadness: the reduction of our capacity to affect and be affected.
We’ve chosen not to use this word very much in this book because we’ve
found it can be misleading in many ways, but the concept of sadness is
important for Spinoza. In the same way that joy gets conflated with
happiness, it’s easy to hear “sad” in terms of its familiar meaning as
an emotion, rather than the way Spinoza intended it: as a reduction of
capacities. For Spinoza, sadness cannot be avoided or eliminated
completely; it is part of life. All things wax, wane, and die
eventually, and the process can provoke thought, resistance, and action.
Sadness and joy can be intertwined in complex ways. But Empire
accumulates and spreads sadness. Drawing on Spinoza, here is how Deleuze
put it:
We live in a world which is generally disagreeable, where not only
people but the established powers have a stake in transmitting sad
affects to us. Sadness, sad affects, are all those which reduce our
power to act. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves.
The tyrant, the priest, the captors of souls need to persuade us that
life is hard and a burden. The powers that be need to repress us no less
than to make us anxious … to administer and organize our intimate little
fears.[14]
Empire propagates and transmits sad affects. Sadness sticks to us; we
are made to desire its rhythms. Terrible situations are made to feel
inevitable. For this reason, we speak of the entrenchment of Spinozan
sadness as that which is stultifying, depleting, disempowering,
individualizing and isolating. But this entrenchment might not feel
agonizing or even unpleasant: it might feel like comfort, boredom, or
safety. We have found the notion of “subjection” helpful here, because
it goes beyond a top-down notion of power. In an interview, the critical
trans scholar and organizer Dean Spade explains why he uses this term
instead of the more common activist term “oppression”:
“Subjection” suggests a more complex set of relationships, where we are
constituted as subjects by these systems, engage in resistance within
these systems, manage and are managed within these systems, and can have
moments of seeing and exploiting the cracks and edges of these systems.
I chose to introduce this term, despite its unfamiliarity in most
activist realms I am part of, because I felt its intervention was a
necessary part of my argument about how power works.[15]
Today, especially in the metropolitan centers of so-called “developed”
countries, subjects are enmeshed in a dense fabric of control. Some of
us are steered into forms of life that are compatible and complicit with
ongoing exploitation and violence, while other populations are selected
for slow death. New forms of subjection are invented to contain each new
rebellion, enrolling subjects to participate in the containment. Prisons
and policing come to be felt (especially by white people) as a form of
safety and security. Misogyny is eroticized and objectification reaches
new heights, taking new forms. Desires for affluence and luxury are
entrenched amidst growing inequality. Through cellphones and social
media, surveillance and control are increasingly participatory. When
they are working, these forms of subjection are felt not as impositions
but as desires, like a warm embrace or an insistent tug.
With all this in mind, we want to pull happiness and joy apart, in hopes
of further clarifying what we mean by joyful militancy. The happiness
offered to us by Empire is not the same as joy, even though they are
conventionally understood as synonyms. For instance, the Oxford English
Dictionary defines joy simply as “a feeling of great pleasure or
happiness.”[16] But whereas joyful transformation undoes the stultifying
effects of Empire, happiness has become a tool of subjection.
Under Empire, happiness is seen as a duty and unhappiness as a disorder.
Marketing firms increasingly sell happy experiences instead of products:
happiness is a relaxing vacation on the beach, an intense night at the
bar, a satisfying drink on a hot day, or the contentment and security of
retirement. As consumers, we are encouraged to become connoisseurs and
customizers, with an ever more refined sense of the kinds of consumption
that make us happy. As workers, we are expected to find happiness in our
job. Neoliberal capitalism encourages its subjects to base their lives
on this search for happiness, promising pleasure, bliss, fulfillment,
arousal, exhilaration, or contentment, depending on your tastes and
proclivities (and your budget).
The search for happiness doesn’t just come through consumption. Empire
also sells the rejection of upward mobility and consumerism as another
form of placid containment: the individual realizes that what really
makes him happy is a life in a small town where everyone knows your
name, or a humble nuclear family, or kinky polyamory, or travel, or
witty banter, or cooking fancy food, or awesome dance parties. The point
is not that these activities are wrong or bad. Many people use food,
dance, sex, intimacy, and travel in ways intertwined with transformative
struggles and bonds. But Empire empties these and other activities of
their transformative potential, inviting us to shape our lives in
pursuit of happiness as the ultimate goal of life. Rebecca Solnit
explains this powerfully:
Happiness is a sort of ridiculous thing we’re all supposed to chase like
dogs chasing cars that suggests there’s some sort of steady wellbeing …
you can feel confident, you can feel loved, but I think joy flashes up
at moments and then you have other important things to attend to.
Happiness—the wall-to-wall carpeting of the psyche—is somewhat
overrated.”[17]
Similarly, feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes that “to be conditioned
by happiness is to like your condition … consensus is produced through
sharing happy objects, creating a blanket whose warmth covers over the
potential of the body to be affected otherwise.”[18] As wall-to-wall
carpeting or a warm blanket, the search for happiness closes off other
possibilities, other textures, other affections. Ahmed shows how the
promise of happiness can be treacherous, encouraging us to ignore or
turn away from suffering—our own or others’—if it threatens happiness.
This promise has a gendered and racialized logic: Empire is designed to
secure white male happiness in particular, while the feelings of women,
genderqueer and trans folks, and people of color are intensely policed.
As Nishnaabe scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes,
I am repeatedly told that I cannot be angry if I want transformative
change—that the expression of anger and rage as emotions are wrong,
misguided, and counter-productive to the movement. The underlying
message in such statements is that we, as Indigenous and Black peoples,
are not allowed to express a full range of human emotions. We are
encouraged to suppress responses that are not deemed palatable or
respectable to settler society. But the correct emotional response to
violence targeting our families is rage.[19]
Simpson shows how the restriction of negative emotions can take place in
movements themselves: imperatives to be happy, nice, or kind can sustain
violence, forcing out anger and antagonism. Unhappiness is pathologized
along with so-called “negative” emotions like rage, despair, resentment,
and fear when they get in the way of promised forms of happiness.
For those who refuse these imperatives, control and coercion lurk behind
happy promises. Being perceived as a threat to the happiness of
others—especially white men—can be lethal. These tangled webs of
subjection are portrayed as individual failings or pathologies.
Unhappiness, outrage, and grief are then perceived as individual
disorders, to be dealt with through pharmaceuticals, self-help, therapy,
and other atomizing responses.
The point is not that happiness is always bad, or that being happy means
being complicit with Empire. Happiness can also be subversive and
dangerous, as part of a process through which one becomes more alive and
capable. But when happiness becomes something to be gripped or chased
after as the meaning of life, it tends to lose its transformative
potential. And if we are not happy—if we are depressed, anxious,
addicted, or “crazy”—we are tasked with fixing ourselves, or at least
with managing our symptoms. The wall-to-wall carpeting of happiness is
an anaesthetic under Empire.
The challenge is not to reject happiness in favor of duty or
self-sacrifice, but to initiate processes of thinking, feeling, and
acting that undo subjection, starting from everyday life. Because Empire
has shaped our very aspirations, moods, and identities, this always
entails grappling with parts of ourselves. This is one of the
fundamental questions that runs through the Spinozan current: How are
people made to desire their own stifling forms of subjection? How do we
come to desire the violent, depleting forms of life offered up by
Empire? How do transformative movements get drawn back into the rhythms
of capitalism and the state? And most importantly, how can we bring
about something different?
Because Empire has a hold on our desires and the rhythms of our lives,
undoing it cannot be about discovering a truth or revealing it to others
as if we have all been duped. The kind of transformation we are
interested in is not about converting people, or finally being able to
see clearly.
To emphasize joy, in contrast to happiness, is to move away from
conditioned habits, reactions, and emotions. Bubbling up in the cracks
of Empire, joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection.
Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of
life itself.[20] It is a process of coming alive and coming apart.
Whereas happiness is used as a numbing anesthetic that induces
dependence, joy is the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new
things, in ways that can break this dependence. It is aesthetic, in its
older meaning, before thinking and feeling were separate: the increase
in our capacity to perceive with our senses. As Mexican activist and
writer Gustavo Esteva explained in his interview with us,
We use the word aesthetic to allude to the ideal of beauty. The
etymological meaning, almost lost, associates the word with the
intensity of sensual experience; it means perceptive, sharp in the
senses. That meaning is retained in words like anaesthesia. Comparing a
funeral in a modern, middle-class family and in a village in Mexico or
India, we can see then the contrast in how one expresses or not their
feelings and how joy and sadness can be combined with great
intensity.[21]
Esteva suggested to us that sentipensar still carries this meaning in
Spanish: the conviction that you cannot think without feeling, or feel
without thinking. As the feminist scholar Silvia Federici explained when
we interviewed her, joy is a palpable sense of collective power:
I like the distinction between happiness and joy. I like joy, like you,
because I think joy is an active passion. It’s not a stagnant state of
being. It’s not satisfaction with things as they are. It’s part of
feeling power’s capacities growing in you and growing in the people
around you. It’s a feeling, a passion, that comes from a process of
transformation. And it’s a process of growth. So this doesn’t
necessarily mean that you have to be satisfied with your situation. It
means that again, using Spinoza, that you understand the situation, and
you’re active in a way that you feel that you are comprehending and
moving along in accordance to what is required in that moment. So you
feel that you have the power to change and you feel yourself changing
with what you’re doing, together with other people. It’s not a form of
acquiescence to what exists.[22]
This feeling of the power to change one’s life and circumstances is at
the core of collective resistance, insurrections, and the construction
of alternatives to life under Empire. Joy is the sentipensar, the
thinking-feeling that arises from becoming capable of more, and often
this entails feeling many emotions at once. It is resonant with what the
Black poet and intellectual Audre Lorde calls the erotic:
For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin
to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in
accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our
erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize
all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects
honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this
is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to
settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor
the merely safe.[23]
Lorde makes it clear that this capacity for feeling is not about
fleeting pleasure or contentment: following its line requires
responsibility and pulls one away from comfort and safety. It undoes
stuckness. It makes stultifying comforts intolerable. In our interview
with writer and activist adrienne maree brown, she emphasized that joy
is the capacity to be more fully present with ourselves and the world:
I feel very fortunate that my mother read The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
to me many times. There is this whole thing on how your sorrow carves
out the space for your joy, and vice versa. That has helped me a lot. In
recent years I have been on a path to learn somatics, how to be in my
wholeness, with my trauma, with my triggers, with my brilliance. It’s
all about being present, being awake inside your real life in real
time.[24]
In this sense, joy does not come about by avoiding pain, but by
struggling amidst and through it. To make space for collective feelings
of rage, grief, or loneliness can be deeply transformative. Empire, in
contrast, works to keep its subjects stuck in individualizing sadness:
held in habits and relationships that are depleting, toxic, and
privatized. This stagnation might be held in place by the pursuit of
happiness, and the attempt to numb or avoid pain. To be more fully
present, in contrast, means tuning in to that which affects us, and
participating actively in the forces that shape us.
This tuning-in might be subtle and tender, or it might be a violent act
of refusal. Sometimes these shifts are barely perceptible and take place
over decades, and sometimes they are dramatic and world-shaking. For
Deleuze, thought begins from cramped spaces where one is hemmed in by
the forces of subjection. It is not an act of individual will, but a
scream that interrupts unbearable forces, opening space for more active
combat.[25] This is why so many movements and struggles begin with a
scream of refusal: NO, ¡Ya Basta!, Enough!, Fuck off. They interrupt
Empire’s powers of subjection and make new practices and new worlds
possible. One spark of refusal can lead to an upwelling of collective
rage and insurrection. In this way, joy can erupt from despair, rage,
hopelessness, resentment, or other so-called “negative” emotions.
Similarly, in a nihilistic vein, the anonymous authors of the queer
journal Bædan unpack jouissance as something that exceeds simple
enjoyment or pleasure, conceiving it as an ecstatic rupture in the
social order imposed by Empire:
We should analyze this distinction between pleasure and pain as being an
inscription of the social order into our bodies. And in the same way, it
is the mundane and miniscule pleasures produced through contemporary
power arrangements which keep us dependent on those arrangements for our
well-being. Jouissance, in abolishing both sides of this distinction,
severs us from pain as a self-preservation instinct and from pleasure as
the society’s alluring bribe. It is the process that momentarily sets us
free from our fear of death (literal or figurative) which is such a
powerful inhibitor.
We can locate this jouissance in the historic moments of queer riot:
Compton’s cafeteria, Dewey’s, the White Night, Stonewall, and countless
other moments where queer bodies participated in rupture—throwing
bricks, setting fires, smashing windows, rejoicing in the streets. But
more to the point, jouissance is located in precisely the aspects of
these moments (and of others unknown to us) which elude historians, the
ones which cannot be captured in a textbook or situated neatly within
narratives of progress for queer people, or of rational political
struggle for a better future.[26]
Jouissance is difficult to pin down because it is movement and
transformation itself. By breaking the divide between pleasure and pain,
it undoes habits that hold subjects in place. We are not suggesting that
there is some hidden unity behind queer nihilist jouissance, the notion
of the erotic in Black feminism, or the Latin American concept of
sentipensar. But we do think that these and other currents resonate with
the Spinozan concept of joy: a process that is transformative,
dangerous, painful, and powerful, but also somewhat elusive. A paradox
of joy is that it can’t be described fully; it is always embodied
differently, as different struggles open up more space for people to
change and be changed. In fact, to grip it, to nail it down, to claim to
represent it fully would be to turn it into a dead image divorced from
its lively unfolding. The way to participate in joyful transformation is
through immersion in it, which is impossible if one is always standing
back, evaluating, or attempting to control things.
Another part of why joyful transformation is difficult to talk about is
because of the inheritance of a dualistic, patriarchal worldview in
which “real” change is supposed to be measurable and observable, and
“intelligence” is the capacity for a detached engineering of outcomes.
Even the capacity to live otherwise and reject parts of Empire is often
presented in patriarchal ways: the subject of revolution is the heroic,
strong-willed individual who has the capacity to see past illusions and
free himself from mistakes and errors of the past. As feminist, queer,
anti-racist, and Indigenous writers have pointed out, this is a vision
that falls back on the detached, masculine individual as the basic unit
of life and freedom.
Rather than trying to rationally direct the course of events, an
affective politics is about learning to participate more actively in the
forces that compose the world and oneself. This is what Spinoza meant by
intelligence. Supporting joy cannot be achieved through a detached
rationality, but only through attunement to relationships, feelings, and
forces—a practical wisdom that supports flourishing and
experimentation.[27] This is how organizer and militant researcher
Marina Sitrin put it when we spoke with her:
I am so excited for this project. It all resonates deeply with things I
have been thinking, witnessing, fearing, and dreaming. The role of joy,
in particular in the way you describe it, is often absent—though not
entirely—from our conversations and constructions in the northern part
of the Americas and Europe. It is both a fairly large and abstract
concept, and at the same time a very simple, direct, and emotive one.
How do we feel when we participate in a movement or group? What are our
relationships to others in the group? Does it feel open? Caring? Social?
Is there trust? Why do we come back to assemblies and actions? Are
people open to one another?[28]
These questions are not just about whether people feel good. They are
about how spaces and struggles affect us, and about the potential of
becoming more alive, open, trusting and creative. Practices that seem to
resemble each other might be vastly different, in terms of what they
enable affectively (or don’t). Depending on the context, the
relationships, and the way things unfold, a tactic like a strike or a
street demo might be based on a dismal conformity to habit or duty, or
it might be a profound experience that connects people in new ways and
opens possibilities for creativity and movement. It might also be a
messy mix of stale routines, reactive containment, and transformative
potential.
As we explore in the next chapter, transformative power might look like
a dramatic break from the relationships and life paths that have been
offered by Empire, but it might also involve more subtle work of
learning to love places, families, friends, and parts of ourselves in
new ways. It entails deepening some bonds while severing others, and
enabling selective openness through firm boundaries. What could it mean
to be militant or fiercely committed to all this? Is it possible to be
militant about creativity and care? Can militancy be something that is
responsive and relationship-based? Can people be militant about joy?
We want to connect joy to militancy for a number of reasons. We are
interested in how the capacity for refusal and the willingness to fight
can be enabling, relational, and can open up potentials for collective
struggle and movement, in ways that are not necessarily associated with
control, duty, or vanguardism. We want an expansive conception of
militancy that affirms the potential of transformation at the expense of
comfort, safety, or predictability. A common definition of militancy is
to be “vigorously active, combative and aggressive, especially in
support of a cause.”[29] We are interested in the ways that putting joy
into contact with militancy helps link fierce struggle with intense
affect: rebellions and movements are not only about determined
resistance, but about opening up collective capacities. With joyful
militancy we want to get at what it means to enliven struggle and care,
combativeness and tenderness, hand in hand.
However, the historical associations and current renderings of militancy
are complex. Historically, militancy is often associated with
Marxist-Leninist and Maoist vanguardism, and the ways these ideologies
have informed revolutionary class struggle and national liberation
struggles. These ideals of militancy have been challenged, especially by
Black, Indigenous, and postcolonial feminists, who have pointed out the
pitfalls of rigid ideology, patriarchal leadership, and the neglect of
care and love. The traditional figure of the militant—zealous, rigid,
and ruthless—has also been challenged by situationism, anarchism,
feminism, queer politics, and other currents that have connected direct
action and struggle to the liberation of desire, foregrounding the
importance of creativity and experimentation. From this perspective, the
militant is the one who is always trying to control things, to take
charge, to educate, to radicalize, and so on. This kind of militant
tends to be two steps behind transformations as they manifest
themselves, always finding them lacking the correct analysis or
strategy, always imposing a framework or program.
The contemporary discourse of counterterrorism associates figures of
militancy with ISIL,[†] the Taliban, and other groups named as enemies
of the United States and its allies. In this way, the specter of the
“militant extremist” helps justify further militarization, surveillance,
imperialism and Islamophobia. The suspected presence of one militant is
enough to turn a whole area into a strike zone in which all
military-aged men are conceived as enemy combatants, and everyone else
as collateral damage. Within this discourse, the militant is
increasingly the ultimate Other, to be targeted for death or indefinite
detention. In all of these representations—from the Maoist rebel to the
terrorist extremist—the figure of the militant tends to be associated
with intense discipline, duty, and armed struggle, and these ways of
being are often posed in opposition to being supple, responsive, or
sensitive. It’s clear that militancy means willingness to fight, but in
its dominant representations, it is cold and calculating.
At the same time, there are other currents of militancy that make space
for transformation and joy. When we interviewed her, queer Filipino
organizer Melanie Matining spoke about its potential to break down
stereotypes:
The word “militancy” for me is a really, really hard one. It was used a
lot in Filipino organizing. I would always connect it to the military
industrial complex, and I didn’t want to replicate that. And then as I
started peeling back the actual things we need to do… As an Asian woman,
to be militant—that’s really fucking rad. It breaks down sterotypes of
submissiveness. The concept of militancy is a new thing for me, and to
embrace it I’m unpacking notions of who I’m supposed to be.[30]
Artist and writer Jackie Wang argues that militancy is not only
tactically necessary, but transformative for those who embody it. In the
context of anti-Blackness in the United States, Wang shows how the
category of “crime” has been constructed around Blackness and how mass
incarceration has led to a politics of safety and respectability that
relies on claims of innocence, contrasted implicitly with (Black) guilt
and criminality. Rejecting the politics of innocence means challenging
the innocent/criminal dichotomy and the institutionalized violence that
subtends it. This form of militancy, Wang argues, is “not about assuming
a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective—it is a
lived position.”[31] Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Wang writes that militancy
has the capacity “to transform people and ‘fundamentally alter’ their
being by emboldening them, removing their passivity and cleansing them
of the ‘core of despair’ crystallized in their bodies.”[32] Living
militancy, from this perspective, is inherently connected to a process
of transformation that undoes the knot of subjection around innocence,
challenges the carceral logics of anti-Blackness, and opens up new
terrains of struggle.
When we asked Indigenous political theorist Glen Coulthard about his
conception of militancy in the context of Indigenous resurgence, he
called it an “emergent radicalism” that destabilizes relations of
domination.[33] Coulthard’s work focuses on Indigenous resurgence and
resistance to settler colonialism. He reveals the ways that Empire
represents Indigenous peoples’ oppression as a constellation of personal
failings and “issues” to be addressed through colonial recognition and
reconciliation. He also focuses on Indigenous refusal and resistance,
the revaluation of Indigenous traditions, and a rise in Indigenous
militancy and direct action. Militancy, in the context of Indigenous
resurgence, is about the capacity to break down colonial structures of
control, including the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force;
it is a break with the colonial state’s attempt to subjugate Indigenous
people and ensure continued exploitation of Indigenous lands. This
emergent militancy isn’t based on a single program or ideology, but
comes out of relationships, as Coulthard says:
It’s emergent in the sense that it’s bottom-up. But it also emerges from
something, and that’s those relationships to land, place, community. So
that is the emergent part. Emergent doesn’t mean entirely new, because
those relationships to place are not new. They’ve always been there, and
are always re-emerging. It comes in cycles. The always-there emergent
militancy is acted on through management strategies, recognition and
accommodation, whatever. That has its effects: it dampens the crisis, it
overcomes contradictions temporarily. And then the militancy will emerge
again. And we’ve seen this four or five times in the last half-century,
these series of containment/management strategies.
…What’s always prior is agency of Indigenous peoples, and capital and
the state are constantly on the defensive, reacting. As opposed to
thinking that we’re always reacting to colonialism, when we privilege
it. It’s this resurgent Indigenous subjectivity that the state is
constantly trying to quell or subdue. And it’s successful, but never
totally successful. And it boils over, comes to the surface, and some
new technology is deployed in order to manage it, and reconciliation is
the latest tool that is doing that work. But it’s always because of our
persistent presence: we’ve never gone away and we’ve been articulating
alternatives in words and deeds.[34]
This conception of militancy as emergent is important because it doesn’t
come out of thin air, or from an enlightened vanguard of militarized men
who suppose that they can see things more clearly than common people. It
comes out of the ongoing refusal of Indigenous peoples to give up their
ways of life. As Kiera Ladner and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson write in
their introduction to This is an Honour Song,
The summer of 1990 brought some strong medicine to Turtle Island. For
many Canadians, “Oka” was the first time they encountered Indigenous
anger, resistance and standoff, and the resistance was quickly dubbed
both the “Oka Crisis” and the “Oka Crises” by the mainstream media. But
to the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) people of Kanehsata:ke, who were living up
their responsibilities to take care of their lands, this was neither a
“crisis” at Oka, nor was it about the non-Native town of “Oka.” This was
about 400 years of colonial injustice. Similarly, for the Kanien’kaehaka
from Kahnawa:ke and Akwesasne who created “crises” by putting up their
own barricades on the Mercier Bridge or by mobilizing and/or mobilizing
support (resources) at Kanehsata:ke, this really had nothing to do with
Oka, a bridge or a golf course. This was about 400 years of resistance.
Like every Indigenous nation occupied by Canada, the Haudenesaunee have
been confronting state/settler societies and their governments since
those societies began threatening the sovereignty, self-determination,
and jurisdiction of the Haudenesaunee. It was not a beginning. Nor was
this the end. This was a culmination of many, many years of Onhkwehonwe
resistance resulting in a decision to put up barricades in defense of,
and to bring attention to, Haudenesaunee land ethics, treaty
responsibilities, and governance.[35]
Indigenous resurgence and events like Oka are not joyful in the sense of
being happy, but in the sense that they are deeply transformative and
able to catalyze solidarity across Turtle Island. But unlike Marxist
conceptions of militancy in which the vanguard is supposed to usher in a
global revolution, it is clear that Indigenous struggles do not
implicate everyone in the same way. As it breaks down colonial
structures of control and dispossession, Indigenous resurgence
implicates us, as settlers, in complicated ways: it unsettles us and our
relationship to land and place, and throws into question received ideas
about who we are, our responsibilities and complicities, what it means
to live here, and our received ideas about what “here” is. It compels us
to learn, together, how to support Indigenous resurgence and resist
settler colonial violence.
Joyful militancy has also emerged in spaces where people generate the
capacity to move with despair and hopelessness, to politicize it. In her
study of the queer movement ACT UP, queer theorist and activist Deborah
Gould shows how their militant tactics not only won institutional
victories that prolonged and saved lives; they were also a process of
world-making:
From its start and throughout its life, ACT UP was a place to fight the
AIDS crisis, and it was always more than that as well. It was a place to
elaborate critiques of the status quo, to imagine alternative worlds, to
express anger, to defy authority, to form sexual and other intimacies,
to practice non-hierarchical governance and self-determination, to argue
with one another, to refashion identities, to experience new feelings,
to be changed.[36]
The militancy of ACT UP was not only about a willingness to be
confrontational and defy conventions of straight society and mainstream
gay and lesbian politics; the movement also created erotically-charged
queer atmospheres and sustained networks of care and support for members
who got sick. Catalyzed by grief and rage, it blew open political
horizons and changed what was possible for people to think, do, and feel
together.
When we asked the Argentina-based intellectual Sebastián Touza about
militancy, he discussed the danger of defining it once and for all:
I don’t know if militancy can be defined “as such.” Probably it is not a
good idea to define it that way because that would entail a general
point of view, an interchangeable and abstract concept, valid for all
situations. But, on the other hand, I would say that a militant is
somebody who struggles for justice in the situation … Thus we have to
pay attention to the situation, to the encounters that take place in it,
to how meaning is elaborated there, to the subjectivities that arise as
a result of those encounters.[37]
This “situated” militancy does not start from a prefabricated notion of
justice. It is an attempt to intervene effectively in the here and now,
based on a capacity to be attuned to relationships. An example of this
could be Touza’s discussion of the struggle of the Mothers of Plaza de
Mayo, a feminist organization that formed in resistance to military
repression in Argentina in the 1970s:
Mothers grew up not from strategic plans but from below: from the pain
of mothers seeking to recover their children who had been kidnapped,
tortured, and “disappeared” by the state. Because they have not
separated affects from political activity, Mothers never consider each
other means toward ends. Nobody has to be subordinated to strengthen the
organization. Rather, they regard each other as ends in themselves. What
bonds them together is not an idea but the affect, love and friendship
that arises from supporting each other, sharing intimate emotions,
moments of joy and sorrow. They organize themselves through consensus,
understood not as a system of decision-making or conflict resolution,
but as a direct engagement with the lives of one another. As in a now
long established feminist tradition, for them the personal is political.
Mothers guide themselves by an ethics of intimate conviction whose
exercise cannot be detached from everyday life. They have a profound
distrust of ideologies and party lines and are proud of their autonomy
from the state, political parties, unions and NGOs. Their autonomy does
not consist in fighting against a dominant ideology, which might summon
the need for the specialized knowledge of a vanguard party, but rather …
in the affirmation of liberating aspects of popular culture that already
exist among them.[38]
The Mothers are a powerful example of how militancy often springs from
everyday life and the bonds of kinship, rather than abstract ideological
or moral commitments. These struggles eventually waned or were absorbed
by Empire, at least partially. The Argentinean government eventually
began using the discourse of human rights and began to offer money and
services as an attempt to relegitimize the state and regain control,
causing deep divisions between the Mothers and other movements in
Argentina.[39] The Canadian government used treaty negotiations,
reconciliation discourses, and other formal processes in an attempt to
quell Indigenous resurgence and militancy. As Coulthard explains above,
new forms of militancy tend to provoke new strategies of containment and
absorption by the state, leading to the invention of new forms of
struggle. None of these movements stayed frozen in one form: in various
ways they transformed, dissolved, shifted, or were institutionalized.
But the fact that Empire always invents new forms of containment is not
evidence that movements have “failed” or that they were misguided.
Joyful transformation sometimes ebbs and flows, becomes captured or
crushed, grows subtler or percolates into everyday life, but always
re-emerges and renews itself.
Militancy is not a fixed ideal to approximate. We cannot be “like” a
militant because militancy—in the way we conceptualize it here—is a
practice that is based in the specificity of situations. We cannot
become these examples, nor should we look to them as ideals. Rather than
boiling joyful militancy down to a fixed way of being or a set of
characteristics, we see it arising in and through the relationships that
people have with each other. This means it will always look different,
based on the emergent connections, relationships, and convictions that
animate it.
In relation to this, we believe it is important to hesitate, lest our
understanding of militancy become another form of rigid radicalism. Not
everyone we spoke with has been enthusiastic about this word. For
instance, in our interview with them, writer and artist Margaret Killjoy
was ambivalent, emphasizing its connection to armed struggle:
I guess I see it as being someone who is “actively” involved in trying
to promote radical social change, and in a non-reformist way. It's
dangerous as terminology … I don't use it much myself … because of
course the first implication it seems to have is that of armed struggle,
which is far from a universally applicable strategy or tactic.[40]
We hope that joyful militancy allows for questions and uncertainties
that are too often smothered by conventional conceptions of militancy.
We also recognize that many will still prefer different language. We are
not suggesting that all joyful struggles share an ideology, a program,
or a set of tactics. What the above examples have in common is that they
express a form of militancy that is attuned to their local situations
and arises from people’s needs, desires, and relationships. What we are
calling joyful militancy is not a shared content, though we do think
there are some shared values and sensibilities. Rather it is an
attunement and activation of collective power that looks different
everywhere, because everywhere is different.
Besides these highly visible examples, joyful militancy also lives in
art and poetry that opens people’s capacities for thinking and feeling
in new ways. It is expressed in quiet forms of subversion and sabotage,
as well as all the forms of care, connection, and support that defy the
isolation and violence of Empire. It is not a question of being a
certain way, but a question of open-ended becoming, starting from
wherever people find themselves.
Joy arises not from the pursuit of a distant goal, but through struggle
in one’s own situation. It often erupts through the capacity to say no,
to refuse, or to attack the debilitating form of life offered up by
Empire. It might come through a riot or a barricade. Or it might come
about by refusing Empire’s offers of insipid happiness, or through the
capacity to be present with grief. Ultimately it is up to people to
figure this out for themselves by composing gestures, histories,
relationships, feelings, textures, world events, neighborhoods,
ancestors, languages, tools, and bodies in a way that enables something
new, deepening a crack in Empire. This is at odds with the stiff, macho
militancy that attempts to control change from above. It cannot be a
kind of more-radical-than-you stance that occupies a fixed position or
argues for a single way forward.
How do we create situations where we feel more alive and capable than
before? What makes the intransigence of oppression feel a little less
stable? What might create more room to move and breathe? What supports
people to refuse the all-too-common traps of moralism, clarity, or
perfectionism in favor of increasing collective power and creativity?
The answers to these questions are infinitely varied and complex. Being
militant about collective, enabling transformation is about trust in
people’s capacities to figure out this way forward together, along with
a willingness to participate openly in the process.
To become what we need to each other, and to find power in friendship,
is to become dangerous.
—anonymous[41]
I have a circle of friends and family with whom I am radically
vulnerable and trust deeply—we call it coevolution through friendship.
—adrienne maree brown[42]
from the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway. See Donna Haraway,
“Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,”
Environmental Humanities 6/1 (2015), 161.
Empire works in part by constantly attenuating and poisoning
relationships. Kinship has been enclosed within the nuclear family,
freedom within the individual, and values within morality. Together,
these enclosures sap relationships of their intensity and their
transformative potential. If relationships are what compose the world
and our lives, then the “free individual” of modern, Western capitalism
(an implicitly straight, white, able-bodied, cis-gendered,
property-owning man) is a sad and lonely vision: a strange fiction
invented by a violent and fearful society, walled in by morality and
self-interest. This is an uprooted being who sees his rootlessness—his
very incapacity to make and sustain transformative connections—as a feat
of excellence.
We suggest that Empire’s grip on relationships is being broken by new
and resurgent forms of intimacy through which people come to depend on
each other, defend each other, and become dangerous together. Friendship
as freedom, in this story, names interdependent relationships as a
source of collective power, a dangerous closeness that Empire works to
eradicate through relentless violence, division, competition,
management, and incitements to see ourselves as isolated individuals or
nuclear family units.
Spinoza helps us dissolve the fiction of the modern Western
individual—and its oscillation between self-interest and morality—into a
relational ethics. A lot of people already navigate their everyday lives
in this way, attuned and responsive to their own situations and
relationships. Along these lines, we draw on a minor current of
anarchism associated with Gustav Landauer and others that centers
relationships as the basis of resistance and movement. We bring these
currents into conversation with Indigenous worldviews and practices,
along with the ethical questions that are being asked and answered in a
multiplicity of ways, in different places, around decolonizing
relationships between settlers and Indigenous people. This conversation
always includes questions of how to sever harmful relationships.
Freedom, in this sense, is not just the capacity to generate “good”
relationships, but also to draw lines in the sand and fight.
These are not just words; they are clues and prods to earthquakes in kin
making that are not limited to Western family apparatuses,
heteronormative or not.
—Donna Haraway[43]
Freedom and friendship used to mean the same thing: intimate,
interdependent relationships and the commitment to face the world
together. At its root, relational freedom isn’t about being
unrestricted: it might mean the capacity for interconnectedness and
attachment. Or mutual support and care. Or shared gratitude and openness
to an uncertain world. Or a new capacity to fight alongside others. But
this is not what freedom has come to mean under Empire.
Look for the dictionary definition of “freedom” today and you’ll find
rights, absences and lack of restrictions at the core, applied to an
isolated individual. Here are some of its definitions in the Oxford
English Dictionary:
The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants:
“we do have some freedom of choice”
The state of not being imprisoned or enslaved:
“the shark thrashed its way to freedom”
The state of not being subject to or affected by (something
undesirable):
“government policies to achieve freedom from want”[44]
At bottom, all of these definitions are about getting away from external
restriction or influence: being unhindered, unaffected, independent.
Under capitalism, freedom is especially associated with free markets and
the free agent who chooses based on individual preferences. In spite of
colonization and capitalism, this vapid form of freedom still can’t get
a foothold in many parts of the world. Even in Europe, where so many
tools of colonization were refined, the roots of freedom were different.
Centuries ago, some Europeans had a more relational conception of
freedom, which wasn’t just about the absence of external constraints,
but also about our immersion in the relationships that sustain us and
make us thrive.
“Freedom” and “friend” share the same early Indo-European root: *fri-,
or *pri-, meaning “love.”[45] This root made its way into Gothic, Norse,
Celtic, Hindi, Russian, and German.[46] A thousand years ago, the
Germanic word for “friend” was the present participle of the verb freon,
“to love.” This language also had an adjective, *frija-. It meant “free”
as in “not in slavery,” where the reason to avoid slavery was to be
among loved ones. Frija meant “beloved, belonging to the circle of one’s
beloved friends and family.”[47] As the Invisible Committee writes in To
Our Friends,
“Friend” and “free” in English … come from the same Indo-European root,
which conveys the idea of a shared power that grows. Being free and
having ties was one and the same thing. I am free because I have ties,
because I am linked to a reality greater than me.”[48]
A few centuries later, freedom became untied from connectedness. The
seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes imagined freedom as
nothing more than an “absence of opposition” possessed by isolated,
selfish individuals. For Hobbes, the free man is constantly armed and on
guard: “When going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house
he locks his chests.”[49] The free individual lives in fear, and can
only feel secure when he knows there are laws and police to protect him
and his possessions. He is definitely he, because this individual is
also founded on patriarchal male supremacy and its associated divisions
of mind/body, aggression/submission, rationality/emotion, and so on. His
so-called autonomy is inseparable from his exploitation of others.
When peasants were “freed,” during this period, it often meant that they
had been forced from their lands and their means of subsistence, leaving
them “free” to sell their labor for a wage in the factories, or starve.
It is no coincidence that these lonely conceptions of freedom arose at
the same time as the European witch trials, the enclosure of common
lands, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonization
and genocide of the Americas. At the same time as the meaning of freedom
was divorced from friendship and connection, the lived connections
between people and places were being dismembered.
As Empire was enclosing lands and bodies, it was overseeing the
enclosure of thought as well. The Age of Reason was marked by a new kind
of knowledge that could subdue and control nature and the human body,
enabling capitalist rationalization and work discipline.[50] Time and
space would become measurable, stable, and fixed. Bodies were no longer
conduits for magical forces, but machines to be harnessed for
production. Plants, animals, and other non-human creatures were no
longer kin, but objects to be dissected and consumed.
Even among intellectuals in Europe, not everyone agreed with Hobbes’s
fearful vision of freedom and the divisions imposed by Cartesian
thought. Descartes’s contemporary, Baruch Spinoza, articulated a
philosophy in which people were inherently intertwined with their world.
Spinoza left instructions for his most important work, the Ethics, to be
published after his death, because he knew he would likely face torture
and execution for the ways his relational worldview undermined both
monotheistic religion and the dualistic philosophy that was emerging
during his own time. Instead of a passive Nature on one hand and an
active, supernatural God on the other, Spinoza envisioned a holistic
reality in which God is present in all things, and in which all things
are active and dynamic processes. Everything is alive and connected.
Mind and body, human and non-human, joy and sadness, are intertwined
with one another.
We do not mean to present Spinoza’s philosophy as a handbook for living
in today’s world. In many ways, Spinoza remained a product of his time
and place: he used the geometric method to create proofs for his
philosophical claims, he couldn’t overcome patriarchal divisions, and he
remained wedded to the state as a vehicle for security. Our interest is
not in Spinoza himself, or even his philosophy as a whole, but in the
way that his ideas are part of a minor current in Western thought that
is more relational, holistic, and dynamic. Spinoza’s work remains
marginal compared to that of Descartes and Hobbes, but his relational
worldview has nevertheless been taken up by radicals at the margins of
philosophy, ecology, feminism, marxism and anarchism.[51]
Most importantly, for us, Spinoza’s philosophy is grounded in
affect.[52] Things are not defined by what they are, but by what they
do: how they affect and are affected by the forces of the world. In this
way, capabilities are not fixed for all time, but are constantly
shifting. This is a fundamental departure from the inherently ableist
and ageist perspective that measures all bodies in relation to the norm
of a “healthy,” “mature,” or “able” body. When starting right from a
body’s material specificity, without any intervening “should,” learning
becomes fundamentally different: rather than detached categorization or
observation of stable properties, it happens through active
experimentation in shared, ever-changing situations.
By creating a philosophy based in affect, Spinoza initiated a radical
critique of ruling institutions and authorities and the ways they
exercise control through subjection, including toxic morality inherited
from centuries of Christianity, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and the
state. But Spinoza’s philosophy did not just undermine Empire’s dominant
morality in order to replace it with a different one; it undermined
morality itself. His worldview was at odds with any notion of an
ultimate ground of right and wrong that was uniform for everyone,
abstracted from the lively flux of relationships and situations. For
Spinoza, life was an exploration of the forces of the world, not
conformity to a fixed ideal.
For moralists this is dangerous because there’s no guarantee against
evil, and no ultimate foundation for moral judgment. Yet the Spinozan
lineage is not about everyone doing whatever they please, according to
isolated interests and preferences. On the contrary, recognizing our
interconnectedness means becoming capable of more fidelity to our web of
relations and our situations, not less. This fidelity is not moral; it
is ethical.
Ethics is often spoken of colloquially as an individual morality: a
static set of principles held by individuals (ethical consumption, codes
of ethics, and so on). In fact, dictionary definitions conflate ethics
with the “moral principles that govern a person’s behavior.”[53] But as
Deleuze explains, a Spinozan conception of ethics results in a
completely different set of questions:
There’s a fundamental difference between Ethics and Morality. Spinoza
doesn’t make up a morality, for a very simple reason: he never asks what
we must do, he always asks what we are capable of, what’s in our power,
ethics is a problem of power, never a problem of duty. In this sense
Spinoza is profoundly immoral. Regarding the moral problem, good and
evil, he has a happy nature because he doesn’t even comprehend what this
means. What he comprehends are good encounters, bad encounters,
increases and diminutions of power. Thus he makes an ethics and not at
all a morality.[54]
Whereas morality asks and answers the question: “what should one do?” a
Spinozan ethics asks: “what is one capable of?” Unlike the cold
abstraction of morality, a body’s capacities can only be discovered
through attunement and experimentation, starting right where you are.
You never know until you try. In trying, whether you “succeed” or
“fail,” you will have learned and changed, and the situation will have
changed, even if only slightly. This sounds simple, and in many ways it
is. It speaks to the ways that many of us already try to navigate our
everyday lives: not by adhering to fixed commandments, but by learning
to inhabit our own situations in ways that make us more capable and more
jointly alive.
Someone gets in touch with bird migrations, insects, weather patterns:
they affect her more and more deeply as she tunes into their rhythms,
over months and years. They begin to make her up. The loss is palpable
as fewer return each year, and her hatred of the destruction grows
alongside her love of the few remaining refuges for non-human creatures
where she lives. Her rage and despair finds resonance with others,
similarly entwined, and they figure out how to fight together. This is
neither individual self-interest, nor moral altruism. It is relational
ethics: the willingness to nurture and defend relationships.[55]
Two friends fold their lives together; they draw new capacities out of
each other. They hurt each other, and they work through it, emerging
more intertwined than before. They are no longer sure which ideas and
mannerisms were “their own” and which belonged to the friend. They know
each other’s triggers and tendencies, intimately. One finds himself in
trouble, and the other drops everything to help, at great personal risk.
But this risk and sacrifice is not because it is morally right, or
because they have calculated that it is in their own self-interest. It
is not even felt as a choice; it is something drawn out of them.
Ethics is the dynamic space beyond static morality and vapid
self-interest: it is the capacity to be responsive to the relationships
that make us up. Whether consciously or not, our desires and choices are
the product of everything that affects us. While this kind of thinking
and practice may be intuitive, it runs against dominant strands of both
Western knowledge and morality, which strive for universalism and
generalizability: they tend towards pinning things down, dictating how
we should act, or predicting what is likely. They ask what humans are
and always will be, what we should always do, or what we usually do (and
how we can be controlled). In contrast, a Spinozan ethics is attuned to
the singularity and openness of each situation: what are we capable of
here and now, together, at this time, in this place, amid the relations
in which we are embedded?
From this perspective, it is not about creating self-contained units,
but about participating in complex, shifting, relational processes. We
always begin in the middle: amid our situations, in our neighborhoods,
with our own penchants, habits, loves, complicities, and connections.
There is no individual that comes before the dense network of relations
in which we’re embedded. This relational space eludes the traps of
individual self-interest and moral duty. It is a space beyond isolated
individuals and altruistic saviors. We are always participating in the
making of our worlds, and being made by them. From this perspective,
freedom can mean nothing other than the ethical expansion of what we’re
capable of—what we’re able to feel and do together. In this vein, the
Invisible Committee writes,
Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical
capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or
dissolve them … the freedom to uproot oneself has always been a
fantasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves of what binds us without at
the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be
applied.[56]
Freedom here is not the absence of restriction or attachment, but the
capacity to become more active in shaping our attachments. This
becoming-active is not about controlling things, but about learning to
participate in their flow, forming intense bonds through which we become
implicated in each other’s struggles and capacities. Within the Spinozan
current, friendship is being revalued: not as a bond between
individuals, but as an ethical relation that remakes us, together, in an
ongoing process of becoming otherwise. Similarly, feminist philosopher
Donna Haraway has argued that “making kin” across divides of species,
nation, gender, and other borders is perhaps the most urgent task
today.[57] Through friendship or kinship we undo ourselves and become
new, in potentially radical and dangerous ways. In this sense,
friendship is at the root of freedom.
Friendship will be the soil from which a new politics will emerge.
—Ivan Illich[58]
Can friendship be revalued as a radical, transformative form of kinship?
We are not sure, but we want to try. Maybe the concept of friendship is
already too colonized by liberalism and capitalism. Under neoliberalism,
friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we
share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are
already like us, and we keep each other comfortable, rather than
becoming different and more capable together. The algorithms of Facebook
and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our
profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button.[59] This
neoliberal friend is the alternative to hetero- and homonormative
coupling: “just friends” implies a much weaker and insignificant bond
than a lover could ever be. Under neoliberal friendship, we don’t have
each other’s backs, and our lives aren’t tangled up together. But these
insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless; only that
friendship is a terrain of struggle. Empire works to usher its subjects
into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake, and to infuse
intimacy with violence and domination. Perhaps friendship can be
revalued in an expansive but specific way: friends, chosen family, and
other kin, intimately connected in a web of mutual support.
Intersecting currents of disability justice, youth liberation, queer
movements, feminism, ecology, anarchism, Indigenous resurgence, and
Black liberation have all emphasized the centrality of nurturing strong
relationships. In our conversation with Glen Coulthard, he emphasized
that joyful militancy can never be an individual choice, because
transformation happens in and through relationships:
The first move toward some sort of self-affirmation or resurgence is
often registered in a very negative reaction: hate, envy, these sorts of
things … This complicates the story a bit. In order to have a kind of
joyful militant positionality or whatever, it requires a whole lot of
other overwhelming positions on the world. And that is where I think
relationships are crucial. I don’t think that this is even possible to
come to on your own. Am I going to respond to this oppressive situation
through a form of self-destruction, or am I going to try and live with
it, or am I going to channel it into more community-building efforts?
And I don’t think that’s ever done in a silo. Those are comrades that
are working together in order to achieve that position. Those are
through the hard conversations ranging from interventions to
who-knows-what, just recognizing that some relationships seem to be more
empowering than others. So getting to be the joyful militant is
complicated. It’s a product of relationships. It’s not the effect of
doing relationships well; it’s because we’re already in relationships of
solidarity. We’re helping each other out, we’re drawing people out of
the negative into more positive relationships. Joyful militants aren’t
choosing and saying “oh, I’m going to do this.”
It’s because I’m being interpellated into more positive relationships
which provide me with different perspectives on the world, that draw me
away from what would be entirely acceptable and rational, and that’s
despair. How do we not have despair in these situations that we’re in?
It’s because relationships are drawing us away from that to the extent
that they can, to the extent that they’re successful. A joyful militant
is less a product of a will to do so; there’s a work, we’re constantly
working on each other. I’m not gonna blame the individual person if
they’re in a situation that is clearly miserable.[60]
In these times, feelings of despair, rage, and hatred make sense. Maybe
they even indicate a healthy receptivity to what is taking place; a
refusal to numb ourselves to the pain and violence of Empire. To shame
people for being in touch with all this, or to tell them to pull
themselves out of it, simply individualizes suffering. Change comes not
from individuals, but from this “constant working on each other,” which
we have called ethics and relational freedom. It might entail supporting
each other to become more present with despair, guilt, resentment, fear,
or grief. It might include channeling anger into attacking Empire,
blocking its flows, or breaking its hold, at least in part. Freedom is
the space that opens when knee-jerk reactions and stifling habits are
suspended. It is the parent learning to trust their kid. It is the teen
who flees a violent home with support from friends. It is the scream of
refusal that elicits rage and action from others. But the key is that
one never does any of this alone, whether a humble gesture causing a
subtle shift, or a decisive act catalyzing dramatic change. Freedom,
gentleness, and militancy always come from—and feed back into—the web of
relationships and affections in which everyone is immersed.
By creating relational webs that reinforce the values we aspire to,
relationships can help undo patterns that Empire has ingrained. Loving
relationships can be what allow us to face the things we fear about
ourselves. They can help undo the ways that we have internalized notions
that we are not good enough, not worthy of love, or that we have to put
up with things that deplete us and those we care about. Relationships of
mutual love and support can enable us to see and feel the toxicity of
some of our attachments. They can help us to look at our patterns of
addiction or depression without shame. Those we love can be our reasons
to stay alive when we aren’t sure that we want to. They can help us
leave miserable situations by leaping with us into the unknown.
Friendships can be the source of our capacity to take risks and get in
the way of violence and exploitation. They can be what make us dangerous
and capable of fighting in new ways. This might be something like what
“friend” meant to some of our European ancestors before the witch
trials: not just someone to hang out with, but someone whose existence
is inseparable from one’s own. A relationship crucial to life, worth
fighting for.
A persnickety linguist or historian might object that there is no
unbroken line of insurgent friendship that lies hidden in history. These
critics are right: it is a zigzagging, disjointed line, always being
broken and reassembled, a story among other stories, resonant with many
other non-European genealogies of relational freedom. But this
elusiveness is what makes it precious and powerful: it is people’s
capacity to constantly form new complicities amid terror and violence.
I don’t need to be empowered by adults; I need them to stop having power
over me.
—Lilah Joy Bergman, age 9
While friendship is made vapid by Empire, coupledom and the nuclear
family become the container for all other forms of intimacy. As
anti-racist, Indigenous, and autonomist feminists have shown, the
nuclear family—where one generation of parents lives with one generation
of children, separated from everyone else—is a recent invention of
Empire.[61] It was (and is) a crucial institution for the privatization
and enclosure of life. It is also central to the maintenance of a
culture of authoritarianism, abuse, and neglect that underpins
heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. It evolved as a way of reproducing
wage-laboring men through the unpaid labor of women. Violence against
women and children within the family was condoned as part of a
civilizing process, and it became a conduit for intergenerational
violence, and for the accumulation of white wealth and property through
inheritance.
Through feminist struggle, some of the most brutal, state-sanctioned
violences of the nuclear family (such as legalized rape and abuse) have
been challenged, but it remains a site of isolation and violence, for
children in particular. One of its most brutal effects is that it makes
other forms of intimacy difficult or unthinkable for many of us. Through
suburbs and apartments designed for a privatized existence, the nuclear
family is even coded into the built environment.
At the same time, people are constantly inventing and recovering other
kinds of belonging and intimacy. They are creatively collectivizing and
communalizing life, sharing income, food, and housing in ways that break
down privatization and segregation. As Silvia Federici writes,
We also have a return to more extended types of families, built not on
blood ties but on friendship relations. This, I think, is a model to
follow. We are obviously in a period of transition and a great deal of
experimentation, but opening up the family – hetero or gay – to a
broader community, breaking down the walls that increasingly isolated it
and prevented it from confronting its problems in a collective way is
the path we must take not to be suffocated by it, and instead strengthen
our resistance to exploitation. The denuclearisation of the family is
the path to the construction of communities of resistance.[62]
Many Indigenous people, people of color, and queer folks have never been
invited into the structure of the nuclear family, and they have always
made kin in other ways. Queer chosen families have created intimate,
intergenerational webs of support, and these radical ties remain alive
in spite of new forms of homonormative capture. As Dean Spade writes,
In the queer communities I’m in valuing friendship is a really big deal,
often coming out of the fact that lots of us don’t have family support,
and build deep supportive structures with other queers. We are
interested in resisting the heteronormative family structure in which
people are expected to form a dyad, marry, have kids, and get all their
needs met within that family structure. A lot of us see that as
unhealthy, as a new technology of post-industrial late capitalism that
is connected to alienating people from community and training them to
think in terms of individuality, to value the smaller unit of the
nuclear family rather than the extended family.[63]
Similarly, bell hooks points to traditions of informal adoption in Black
communities, in which people adopted and cared for children in ways that
were communally recognized but never sanctioned by the state:
Let’s say you didn’t have any children and your neighbor had eight kids.
You might negotiate with her to adopt a child, who would then come live
with you, but there would never be any kind of formal adoption, yet
everybody would recognize her as your “play daughter.” My community was
unusual in that gay black men were also able to informally adopt
children. And in this case there was a kinship structure in the
community where people would go home and visit their folks if they
wanted to, stay with them (or what have you), but they would also be
able to stay with the person who was loving and parenting them.[64]
Leanne Simpson, writing on Indigenous nationhood, notes how resurgence
entails displacing settler colonialism and the nuclear family with “big,
beautiful, diverse, extended multiracial families of relatives and
friends that care very deeply for each other.”[65] In many ways, these
kinds of relationships make possible and sustain the creation of
intergenerational forms of organizing that include kids and elders, and
break down divides between public and private. Simpson spoke to the
importance of this when we interviewed her:
How change happens matters to me, which is why I don’t spend much time
lobbying the state. I believe in creating the change on the ground, and
creating and living the alternatives. In my nation, children and Elders
are critical, and it means we organize differently. You can’t invite
kids to a twelve-hour, boring meeting and then get frustrated because
they are bored or frustrated because they won’t stay with the childcare
worker they’ve never met. You can’t invite the Elders to welcome people
to the territory and then not speak to the issues. I think we actually
need to do less organizing and more movement building. Right now, we
have activists, not leaders. We have actions, not community. My kids are
also fundamentally not interested in “the movement.” They are, however,
fundamentally interested in doing things.[66]
These kinds of non-nuclear kinship networks have been sustained in the
face of state terrorism and incarceration, residential and boarding
schools, and Empire’s ongoing attempts to privatize and destroy
non-nuclear kinship networks, extended families, and webs of
relationships that include non-human kin. Nourishing and sustaining
these communal forms of life throws into question some of the dominant
ideas about what counts as political work, about separation of activism
or organizing from everyday life. They challenge the segregation of kids
from the rest of the world (and from organizing and politics in
particular) and the ways that elders are isolated and intergenerational
connections are lost.
Creating intergenerational webs of intimacy and support is a radical act
in a world that has privatized child-rearing, housing, subsistence and
decision-making. Challenging the nuclear family is not about a
puritanical rejection of anything that resembles it; it is about
creating alternatives to its hegemony, to the dismembering of social
relations, to the spatial division of people through suburbanization,
incarceration, schooling, dispossession, and displacement. This entails
the proliferation of relationships that may or may not be based on blood
but are built on care and love. The Latin American political theorist
Raúl Zibechi argues that non-nuclear family and kinship networks are at
the heart of Latin America’s most transformative and militant movements,
including those of Indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, landless and
homeless movements, piqueteros, and women’s and youth movements.[67]
These collective forms of life are based in new forms of dwelling,
subsistence, and resistance. At the same time, Zibechi is clear that
these are “only tendencies, aspirations, or attempts in the midst of
social struggles.”[68] Relationships of mutual support are not a
destination but a continual process of struggle.
As people renew intergenerational relationships and bring their whole
lives into struggle, new forms of politics emerge. In this context,
Silvia Federici argues,
This is why the idea of creating “self-reproducing” movements has been
so powerful. It means creating a certain social fabric and forms of
co-operative reproduction that can give continuity and strength to our
struggles, and a more solid base to our solidarity. We need to create
forms of life in which political activism is not separated from the task
of our daily reproduction, so that relations of trust and commitment can
develop that today remain on the horizon. We need to put our lives in
common with the lives of other people to have movements that are solid
and do not rise up and then dissipate. Sharing reproduction, this is
what began to happen within the Occupy Movement and what usually happens
when a struggle reaches a moment of almost insurrectional power. For
example, when a strike goes on for several months, people begin to put
their lives in common because they have to mobilise all their resources
not to be defeated.[69]
Federici here gets at the way in which care is not only a means of
maintaining struggles, but a transformative part of struggle itself.
While Empire works to privatize and individualize our daily lives, many
movements are reproducing themselves more autonomously by collectivizing
care: from cooking to cohabitation to learning to just being present
with each other.
Friendship, kinship, and communalization have also been at the heart of
working across the hierarchical divides of heteropatriarchy, white
supremacy, colonization, ableism, ecocide, and other systems that have
taught us to enact violence on each other and internalize oppressive
ways of relating. To make kin across these divisions is a precarious and
radical act. Everyone knows how difficult this can be, and how people
fuck up, hurt each other, and blame each other. Those conscripted into
oppressive roles can always fall back into old habits. In some cases,
people are able to talk about all this in ways that are subtle, gentle,
and more attuned to each other’s tendencies, triggers, and gifts, and
genuine relations of support emerge. In the context of queer,
anti-racist disability justice, Mia Mingus speaks to the centrality of
strong relationships for undoing oppression:
Any kind of systematic change we want to make will require us to work
together to do it. And we have to have relationships strong enough to
hold us as we go up against something as powerful as the state, the
medical industrial complex, the prison system, the gender binary system,
the church, immigration system, the war machine, global capitalism.
Because we’re going to mess up. Of that I am sure. We cannot, on the one
hand have sharp analysis about how pervasive systems of oppression and
violence are and then on the other hand, expect people to act like
that’s not the world we exist in. Of course there are times we are going
to do and say oppressive things, of course we are going to hurt each
other, of course we are going to be violent, collude in violence or
accept violence as normal.
We must roll up our sleeves and start doing the hard work of learning
how to work through conflict, pain and hurt as if our lives depended on
it—because they do.[70]
Between the authors of this book, friendship has required us to
negotiate divisions ingrained in our bodies by ageism, patriarchy,
capitalism, and ableism. Sometimes these divisions get in the way of our
capacity to connect in ways that are enabling and transformative.
Patriarchy has socialized Nick, as a man, to be self-assured,
(over)confident, rational, and individualistic. carla has been
socialized to be submissive, caring, diffident, and to put others before
herself. Even as we worked against some of these tendencies, carla ended
up doing more emotional and caring labor for this project and Nick ended
up doing more labor when it came to writing and editing. We have also
been learning to challenge these divisions, always partially and
inconsistently, through processes of mutual growth, support, and
(un)learning. In part because of our very different life experiences,
skill sets, and perspectives, our collaborative process has enabled us
to produce something new together and made us both more capable in new
ways. Neither of us could have written this book, or anything like it,
alone.
Ultimately, nourishing these kinds of intimacies means putting
relationships before abstract political commitments and ideologies. At
the same time, we think it is possible to recover relational currents
within anti-authoritarian political traditions without appropriating the
ideas and struggles of others. Within anarchism, the Spinozan current
flows through Gustav Landauer’s relational conception of anarchism.
Landauer’s philosophy ran against the grain of the dominant strands of
revolutionary Marxism and anarchism of his time, which conceived
revolution as a dramatic event that would take place in the future.
Instead of envisioning a future event of transformation in which
capitalism and the state would be destroyed and all of humanity could be
liberated, Landauer insisted on the importance of a living, present
anarchism, and on transforming our relationships here and now.
Landauer also argued that the state’s power lies not only with armies or
police, but in its capacity to get us to govern ourselves and each
other, and to recreate its hierarchical and divisive relationships
through our conduct:
A table can be overturned and a window can be smashed. However, those
who believe that the state is also a thing or a fetish that can be
overturned or smashed are sophists and believers in the Word. The state
is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one
another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e.,
by people relating to one another differently.[71]
The state and capitalism are systems designed to amass wealth for a tiny
minority, and while Empire’s figureheads are people with names and
addresses, others will replace them when they are gone. Instead of
destroying Empire, Landauer raised the question of how to undo its hold
on relationships, and how to generate new and different relations in its
place. This is an ethical question, not a moral one. Like Spinoza, he
suggested that that there was no single answer for everyone. He insisted
that a notion of worldwide socialism or anarchism was too totalizing,
and he recognized that other people and cultures would have different
answers to the question of how to live:
We have long enough misunderstood socialism as a vague, general
ideology, a magic wand that opens all doors and solves all problems. We
should know by now that everything out in the world as well as within
our souls is so jumbled that there will never be only one way to
happiness. So what I am advocating here has nothing to do with a call on
humanity. We have to realize that different cultures exist next to each
other and that the dream that all should be the same cannot be sustained
– in fact, it is not even a beautiful dream.[72]
In a way that resonates with many anti-authoritarian currents of today,
Landauer refused to hold anarchism up as a single moral or ideological
project that would free all of humanity from oppression. But while
refusing this universalizing project, Landauer was also critical of
individualist anarchists like Max Stirner, who also refused morality but
rooted his philosophy in the liberation of the individual ego or
desire.[73] In contrast, Landauer insisted that individual people could
not be abstracted from their already existing relationships, values, and
communities. Like the state, the self-enclosed individual is a fiction
of Empire. “I” am already a crowd, enmeshed in others.
For Landauer then, transformation was an immediate, situated, ethical
project that could only be based on transforming ourselves,
collectively, starting from where we are, and seeking out affinities
with others. “Only when anarchy becomes, for us, a dark, deep dream, not
a vision attainable through concepts,” Landauer wrote, “can our ethics
and our actions become one.”[74] Similarly, scott crow writes,
“Anarchism is not rigid, it is flexible and fluid so cast aside your
thoughts about the way it ‘should’ be and help make it what it ‘could
be.’”[75] Freedom, in this sense, is not the absence of Empire, secured
through a glorious future revolution or the triumph of an anarchist
blueprint. Freedom is the capacity to grapple with some of the toxic
habits and relationships fostered by Empire, and to recover other ways
of relating. This anarchism can only be an action or a process.
Anarchist political theorist Richard Day has drawn on Landauer,
Kropotkin, and others to reveal a current of anarchism that is about the
capacity to create immediate, living alternatives to the state,
capitalism, morality, and Empire’s oppressive divisions. There are
always forms of alliance and mutual aid that exceed Empire, from the
ways plants and animals support each other symbiotically, to everyday
forms of cooperation and solidarity that crop up in spite of subjection.
Day calls this the logic of affinity, which is “ever-present, even in
the most advanced forms of (post)industrial bureaucratic control. It is
not a dream, but an actuality; not something to be yearned for, but
something to be noticed in operation everywhere, at every moment of
every day.”[76] From this perspective, affinity can be discerned in
every process of joyful transformation, large and small, in which people
discover new capacities together, resist, invent, or activate something
that is already in play. The capacity to carve out autonomous forms of
life is always under attack by Empire, and always resurfacing.
This concept of affinity is important to us because it gets at the way
forms of life can connect based in shared commitments or desires without
erasing differences. We follow Day in suggesting that there is an
“affinity for affinity” among currents of Indigenous, anti-racist,
anti-colonial, migrant justice, anarchist, feminist, ecological, queer,
and autonomist currents of thought and practice: a penchant for linking
up and supporting others based on shared values and commitments without
trampling on each other’s autonomy.[77] It can be seen, for example, in
the Zapatistas’ vision of “a world where many worlds fit.”[78]
Similarly, affinity is resonant with what Gloria Anzaldúa calls
“bridging” in This Bridge We Call Home:
Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and
without. To step across the threshold is to be stripped of the illusion
of safety because it moves us into unfamiliar territory and does not
grant safe passage. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we
must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to
risk being wounded. Effective bridging comes from knowing when to close
ranks to those outside our home, group, community, nation—and when to
keep the gates open.[79]
These notions of affinity and bridging turn connection into an
open-ended ethical question rather than an assumption, a goal, or a
moral imperative. How do we relate? Who is this “we”? How do we affect
each other? How and when to be open, selectively? How might we be able
to work together? These questions can only be answered by people in
their own situations, as relationships unfold.
While we hope some of the affinities between Spinozan currents and
Indigenous worldviews are emergent throughout this chapter, we want to
spend some time thinking about them directly, especially in light of the
relational conceptions we have outlined above. We think the relational
conceptions of anarchism and friendship are resonant with (though
necessarily distinct from) the lifeways of Indigenous peoples and many
other societies that ground their worlds in connectedness to each other
and the places they inhabit. For instance, writer and facilitator Zainab
Amadahy offers a “relationship framework” that sees all life as
fundamentally interconnected:
We two-leggeds are inter-connected with each other and with other life
on the planet -- indeed, even to the planet itself and beyond. What we
think, say, and do impacts, directly and indirectly, everything and
everyone else, which also affect us. We are further impacted by
ancestors and will impact generations to come. Some of us even believe
the reverse; that we can impact our ancestors and that our descendants
impact us. In any case, we are clearly “in relationship” whether we
acknowledge, fully understand and respect the concept or not.[80]
In our conversation with Glen Coulthard, he elaborated on his notion of
place-based Indigenous ethics, which he calls “grounded normativity.”
Coulthard shows how Indigenous resistance and values are literally
grounded in the ongoing renewal of reciprocal relationships with land:
I don’t think you come to these things on your own. We’re always kind of
embedded and constituted by what’s around us. The whole book I wrote
[Red Skin, White Masks] is based on this. I’m nothing; I’m just a
product of the messy relationships that have formed me over time. And
the point about the book is, we’ve tended to think of these
relationships as anthropocentric. But we’re also shaped by the
other-than-human relations that we’re thrown into, including
relationships to place and land itself, and that can have an effect on
our perspective; it can shape our normativities, or what we think is
right or wrong.[81]
Red Skin, White Masks shows how these relational webs have been
foundational for Indigenous resurgence against settler colonialism, and
inexorably connected to the struggle over land:
The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including
Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily
inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only
for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the
land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us
about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world
in nondominating and nonexploitative terms.[82]
From this perspective, settler colonialism is an attack on Indigenous
bodies and lands, and on the grounded normativities that sustain them.
It is an attack on Indigenous forms of life. For the same reason,
Coulthard suggests that recovering, sustaining, and defending these
forms of life becomes crucial to decolonization and resistance:
Repetition, doing things, shapes how you see things. And depending on
what that practice is, it can double back and shape how you do things.
And in a land-based context, that kind of cyclical, dual
conditioning—how we produce the necessities of our lives shapes our
spiritual understandings and those can, over time, double back and shape
how we go about doing things in the material sense. What we’re seeing
now to validate this is that Indigenous people have been dragged away
from those practices violently, into other ones oriented around a
different mode of production, a different way of producing the
necessities of life, through resource extraction, and that is now
shaping our normative worlds; what we see as right or wrong. And it’s
because these long-standing practices are being disrupted. Now what
we’re doing with Dechinta and other land-based practices is we’re
re-establishing—in an impure form because we’re all learning again—these
different normative practices and worlds. And an important part of that
is our relationship with land and other-than-human kin. So prefiguration
is that emphasis on the importance of practice, and shaping even what we
think our ends should be … it’s a very practical ethics … That’s not to
devalue it; I actually hold this more valuable than abstract normative
traditions where you have to dissociate yourself from your relationships
in order to come up with pure principles, and that just results in a
never-ending, always-there gap between what our ideals are, and where
our shitty world is at. It justifies that. In theory we have it nailed
down, we just haven’t quite approximated that in our lives and
institutions. In contrast, the grounded normativity, practical,
prefigurative starting place is saying no, those ideals are formed by
what we do with our lives—by the relationships that we sustain and
renew.[83]
In a way that resonates with the relational conception of anarchism we
explored above, Coulthard speaks to the importance of prefiguration:
nurturing relationships informed by reciprocity with human and
other-than-human kin. Similarly, in her book Dancing on Our Turtle’s
Back, Leanne Simpson writes that she is “not so concerned with how we
dismantle the master’s house, that is, which set of theories we use to
critique colonialism; but I am very concerned with how we (re)build our
own house, or our own houses.[84]
Recovering forms of life that have been subjugated or ruled out entails
resistance and transgressing of laws or norms, but these negations are
only what is visible from the perspective of Empire. It is clear that
this is not resistance for its own sake, or (only) because Empire is
monstrous: resurgent forms of life are also about values and connections
worth defending and nurturing.
While there may be resonances with anarchism, Coulthard and Simpson are
speaking about the resurgence of specific, Indigenous forms of life.
Where we live, resonances and affinities between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous forms of life are always marked by the violence of
settler colonialism. Our lives are inextricably linked to structures
bent on the eradication of Indigenous life and the exploitation of
Indigenous land. Navigating these uncertain connections requires dealing
with difficult ethical questions.
In our part of the world, it is clear that we are living in the midst of
Indigenous resurgence. All over Turtle Island, Indigenous peoples are
reasserting their ties and responsibilities to their lands, refusing the
racist and heteropatriarchal divisions imposed by Empire, and recovering
relationships based in care and consent. This is an intensification of
what has been happening since colonization began.
For non-Indigenous people—and for white, European-descended settlers who
live on Indigenous land, specifically—this can be profoundly unsettling.
Can non-Indigenous people support Indigenous resurgence? Can alliances
productively stretch across the colonial divide? Through messy, uneven
processes, settlers and Indigenous peoples are answering these questions
together. Many non-Indigenous people are beginning to see themselves as
settlers, complicit in ongoing dispossession and colonization of
Indigenous forms of life. Black and Indigenous communities are forging
alliances to resist the intertwined violences of settler colonialism and
anti-Blackness. As Luam Kidane and Jarrett Martineau write,
These dreams of freedom mean that our acts of resistance are
inextricably linked as Afrikan peoples and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle
Island. But fundamentally, what this means is that we need to seriously,
purposefully and with urgency begin to look to each other—not to the
state—for our self-determination.[85]
As Indigenous resurgence and Black uprising reshape life throughout
North America, new affinities and new forms of co-resistance are
emerging. It is increasingly clear that decolonization is fundamental to
all struggles to dismantle Empire and live differently here and now in
North America. Decolonization has fundamentally shifted the values,
priorities, and organizing practices of many anarchists,
anti-authoritarians, and other radicals. As Harsha Walia writes,
A growing number of social movements are recognizing that Indigenous
self-determination must become the foundation for all our broader social
justice mobilizing. Indigenous peoples in Canada are the most impacted
by the pillage of lands, experience disproportionate poverty and
homelessness, are overrepresented in statistics of missing and murdered
women and are the primary targets of repressive policing and
prosecutions in the criminal injustice system. Rather than being treated
as a single issue within a laundry list of demands, Indigenous
self-determination is increasingly understood as intertwined with
struggles against racism, poverty, police violence, war and occupation,
violence against women and environmental justice.[86]
Indigenous people have forged alliances with ranchers and farmers
resisting pipelines, with migrants resisting border imperialism, and
with Black communities resisting criminalization and the prison
industrial complex. They have linked up with anarchists while
challenging them to rethink colonial conceptions of nation, territory,
tradition, and authority. Some settlers are learning to take
responsibility for developing relationships with the people whose land
they are on, and learning to support Indigenous leadership. Indigenous
resurgence has pushed non-Indigenous people to learn the histories and
protocols of the lands where they live, to ask what it means to honor
treaties, and what it means to live on land where treaties were never
signed. In our conversation with Coulthard, he spoke to the potential of
recovering Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjugated knowledges and forms
of life, and exploring affinities between them:
Coulthard: If those [Indigenous] relationships to land and place and
those sustaining connections are destroyed, then our views change on
what’s good, what’s just. So what we’re trying to do in terms of
land-based decolonizing education is to ensure that those practical
relationships that inform our philosophical systems and vice versa are
maintained to the best of our ability, and that requires a struggle and
conflict with the forces that are trying to destroy it.
Nick and carla: It seems like white settlers are the ones who’ve allowed
their own grounded normativities to be destroyed, or they have been
destroyed, at least mostly. And we’ve been invited to participate in the
destruction of Indigenous peoples’ grounded normativities.
Coulthard: I think the point that’s important here is that we’re talking
about hegemonies. So grounded normativities are being wiped out by a
hegemonic system—a system of dominance. So when you say “the problem
with settler life is that it’s doing this,” I would say, in my more
generous moments, that the hegemonic settler form of life is destroying
Indigenous forms of life, but settlers have a whole host of other
grounded normativities that have themselves been violently ruled out of
existence. Whether that’s radical ecological stuff to anarchist stuff to
Marxist stuff—whatever: they’re subaltern knowledges and practices. And
there are affinities between those that we can map out and explore.
There’s a lot within non-Indigenous settler traditions that have
suffered their own erasure that might be brought back to the fore. And
that’s way better than the alternative, which is stealing what we’ve
got. So what Foucault would refer to as a resurgence of subaltern
knowledges. There’s a rich history of overlap and affinities that I
think need to be drawn on, and crucial to avoid the violences of
cultural appropriation and “becoming Indigenous.”[87]
Exploring affinities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditions
and forms of life raises a lot of questions. There is a deep ambivalence
to the recovery of non-Indigenous traditions, or the creation of new
alternatives, especially those that involve direct connections to land.
Deepening these relationships—with seasons, territories, plants, and
other-than-human forces where we live—can end up entrenching
dispossession and colonization.
From conservation to farming to fishing, many settler (especially
European) traditions have evolved or been sustained through Indigenous
dispossession and an attack on Indigenous forms of life. Settler
colonialism has always included a project of attaching white bodies to
Indigenous land, and attempts to “reclaim the commons” can erase
Indigenous presence.
At the same time, there are emergent alliances and relationships between
settlers and Indigenous people, based in consent and shared
responsibility. Settlers are critically revaluing some of their own
traditions in ways that enable new affinities and solidarities. Settlers
have been able to offer their own practical land-connected skills and
knowledge like herbalism, bioremediation, cooking, carpentry, ecological
gardening and more, alongside the skills and knowledges held by
Indigenous people.
In our experience, it has been settlers rooted in their own traditions
and values who are most capable of building strong relationships with
Indigenous peoples, showing up in meaningful ways, and decentering
themselves and staying on the sidelines when it is appropriate. It is
people with strong friendships—their own webs of care and support—who
are able to consistently support decolonization, whether that means
supporting frontline land defense struggles or urban Indigenous
initiatives, or cultivating meaningful, long-term relationships with
local Indigenous folks where they live.
These capacities are not based on abstract morality, nor are they about
having the most bang-on anticolonial analysis. They are based on a web
of connectivity that enables people to think and act differently. One
thing that is clear to us about Indigenous resurgence is that it is
driven and sustained by these deep connections and relationships that
colonization seeks to destroy. Rebuilding and sustaining these
connections is clearly at the root of decolonization—for Indigenous and
non-Indigenous people, differently.
How can settlers and Indigenous people explore affinities between
autonomous forms of life? What are the potentials and pitfalls of
revitalizing non-Indigenous traditions (or inventing new ones) on stolen
ground? These questions cannot be answered in the abstract, but are
already being asked and answered collectively, over and over again, in
multiple ways, across different territories, movements, and struggles.
Hanging onto these as ethical questions, we think, helps get beyond the
shame and guilt of moralism that can be so immobilizing (and
counterproductive) for settlers—especially white settlers. Instead of
the narcissistic shame that impels settlers to ask for and demand
absolution from Indigenous peoples, ethical questions can shift people
towards active responsibility that is rooted in consent, as Indigenous
people often emphasize. For us, this means finding the wiggle room of
freedom—the capacity to work on our relationships—and participate in new
and old forms of nurturance and resistance.
If one would have a friend, then must one also be willing to wage war
for him: and in order to wage war, one must be capable of being an
enemy.
—Friedrich Nietzsche[88]
Working on relationships also means the capacity to dissolve and sever
them, and to block those which are harmful. Affinity and bridging
require selective openness, with firm boundaries. In this sense,
cultivating joyful militancy not only requires cultivating “good”
relationships, but also severing those that are unhealthy and damaging.
Coulthard drove this point home when we talked with him:
Part of the effect that you see in joyful militancy is an attentiveness
to cultivating healthy relationships. And I think that that’s great;
there is a productive line of flight … but sometimes—and this is kind of
what I’ve been thinking a lot about since writing about reconciliation
and resentment—is that the whole idea of a “good relationship”—a
positive one instead of a negative one—is almost entirely co-opted by
relationship-destroying structures that entrench violence,
dispossession, disappearance, all these things, where we’re always
compelled to be productive. It’s a compulsion that’s insisted on and
that is done asymmetrically across certain bodies. So it’s a demand
that’s placed on us as Indigenous peoples, even in terms of having a
conversation. It can even be about tone: your tone is negative … Some
relationships are just bullshit and we shouldn’t be in them. We should
actually draw lines in the sand more willingly, in order to avoid the
kind of status quo outcome that’s caused by the compulsion to always be
in a positive relationship to others. Others might suck. We shouldn’t be
relating to them; we should be fighting them; we should be seeking to
destroy them in some circumstances. Because their whole identity, their
whole form of life is predicated on our negation. So that’s why, in
Canada, Canadians can’t cease to exist in the sense that they understand
themselves, because it’s predicated on a genocidal relationship. And
there can be no mutual recognition, there can be no mutual respect,
because the relationship itself negates that possibility. And that’s a
pretty somber situation. It’s not a joyful acknowledgement.[89]
Relational freedom necessarily includes undoing destructive
relationships, dissolving or attacking depleting or harmful forces.
Freedom is the capacity to make friends and enemies, to be open and to
have firm boundaries. Joyful, deeply transformative relationships are
only possible through vulnerability and trust, but they also entail the
risk of being deeply hurt. In this context, Mia Mingus speaks to the
importance of a kind of love that is assertive and accountable:
What I’m talking about is reinventing how we love each other and knowing
that solidarity is love, collaboration is love. And really, isn’t that
what queerness is about: loving? I am talking about growing and
cultivating a deep love that starts with those closest to us and letting
it permeate out. Starting with our own communities. Building strong
foundations of love.
And I just want to be clear, I am not talking about love that isn’t
accountable. I am not talking about staying in harmful and dangerous or
abusive relationships. The kind of love I want us to grow is accountable
and assertive. Really, I am talking about collective love, where we look
out for each other.[90]
For this kind of collective love to exist, sometimes it is necessary to
sever relationships. Sometimes friendship and close bonds are a messy
mix of closeness, struggle, and distance. In this sense, Empire destroys
our capacity to identify enemies, too: morality, policing, law, and
prisons are all designed to monopolize the power to decide whose actions
are right and wrong, and how they should be dealt with.
For the same reason, if reduced to an imperative to always have “good
relationships” with everyone and everything, joyful militancy and
friendship become simplistic, reactionary, and colonial in their erasure
of power relations and systemic violence. This is the hegemonic morality
of Empire—the notion that Indigenous people have to “get over” the
past—and it plays itself out not only in state-based efforts at
“reconciliation,” but also among everyday relationships between settlers
and Indigenous people that reinscribe settler entitlement. Leanne
Simpson spoke to this forcefully when we asked her to share her
perspective on the potential of friendship between settlers and
Indigenous people:
Nick and carla: One of the themes that emerged in a lot of our
interviews is the importance of trust and friendship for creating and
sustaining joyful militancy and transformative movement infused with
love. Under conditions of settler colonialism, trust and friendship
between settlers and Indigenous people seems especially difficult,
because settlers and our governments have violated this trust over and
over, and broken trust is the status quo. What makes trust and
friendship possible? Do you see it as an important part of
decolonization?
Leanne Simpson: My honest answer is no, I don’t. Friendship has been and
is used by so-called white “allies” in pretty horrible ways—everything
from “my friend is native and therefore …” to using friendship as a
mechanism to protect against white guilt, to using friendship to
appropriate. Friendship for me is a crazy-intimate, personal decision
and it isn’t helpful for me to feel pressure to trust or be friends with
people I don’t trust and don’t want to be friends with. The white
allyship takes up a lot of space and it’s a lot of work for Indigenous
peoples. White people love being friends with Indigenous peoples. For
me, there is huge gap in our life experiences, often our interests and
our politics. That doesn’t mean we can’t find useful and strategic ways
of working together but don’t make me go to potlucks or backyard BBQs
and make the assumption that my personal life is part of the movement.
My personal life is not for the taking.
I also see that I have a responsibility to build trust and friendships
within the Indigenous community. That is important work because the
forces to divide us and make us hate each other are enormous. This does
indeed make our movements strong because it’s community building.”[91]
For us, this gets at the danger of setting up friendship or affinity as
an ideal, norm, or expectation, especially across the colonial divide
and other hierarchical divisions created by Empire. While Simpson speaks
to the importance of building trust and friendship among Indigenous
people, she is clear that settlers (particularly white settlers seeking
to be allies) often end up perpetuating extractive, entitled tendencies.
For settlers, getting out of the way might be more important than
seeking connection.
Just as intimacy and closeness can be enabling, they can also be sources
of coercion, manipulation, and exploitation. To insist on, seek out, or
use friendship—and to pathologize its refusal—tends to reinforce these
divisions and hierarchies, rather than unravel them. It regenerates the
worst of Empire, where oppressed people are expected to stay in
oppressive relationships, and their refusal is dismissed as
“counterproductive.”
Similar patterns arise to pathologize women and genderqueer folks who
refuse to “get over” heteropatriarchy, Black folks and people of color
who refuse to “get over” racism, and everyone else who has experienced
the liberal trope of “let’s all get along.” Entitlement to others’ time,
energy, and love can be an unconscious strategy that reproduces
domination through intimacy. Love and friendship can be contorted to
erase power and exploitation, enforcing obedience to oppressive norms of
politeness or devotion.
Joyful militancy is not a way of dividing the world into “positive” and
“negative” ways of being, or asking that we all get along and be happy
together. Freedom always needs to retain the potential of refusal,
negation, and resistance. To turn friendship into a solution or a goal
is to erase the form of freedom we are getting at, which is the freedom
to work at relationships—to participate more actively in the shaping of
our worlds.
What makes people fight for each other, support each other in radical
ways, and construct durable, loving bonds? What makes it possible for
people to sever or dissolve stifling attachments or relationships? We do
not think the answer is ideology; abstract political values might
support short-term alliances, but we doubt their capacity to be the glue
that holds people together in the long term. Instead, we suggest that
strong relationships are the foundation of resistance. Recovering and
sustaining deeper forms of friendship and kinship are indispensable for
undoing Empire’s hold.
Sometimes divisions get in the way and people hurt each other too much,
too often. Sedimented habits continue to grip us, closing off potentials
for being otherwise together. Maintaining transformative relationships
is not easy in a world full of violence, in which Empire continually
induces us (especially white, cis-male settlers) to construct flimsy
relationships based in leisure, and to abandon them if they are no
longer pleasurable. For many who live in big cities, don’t have kids,
and benefit from a lot of mobility, it is always possible to go
somewhere else, to find another group of people to hang out with.
We can’t all be friends, and some forms of life will never be
compatible. This is the ethical basis of the logic of affinity, as well:
it can never be a totally inclusive, come-one-come-all process, because
this would mean welcoming the worst of Empire, and all of its toxic ways
of relating. Some differences might mean that people cannot work
together. Maybe. Differences might also signal potential for practices,
orientations, and priorities that are resonant and complementary without
becoming the same. Differences might then become starting points for new
complicities and the growth of shared power.
If relationships are what compose the world—and what shape our desires,
values, and capacities—then freedom is the capacity to participate more
actively in this process of composition. Friendship and resistance are
interconnected: when we are supported, we are more willing to confront
that which threatens to destroy our worlds. Friendship and affinity are
not things but processes and open questions, which produce partial
responses, further questions, flashes of certainty and confidence, but
never definitive answers.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine
right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human
beings.
—Ursula K. Le Guin[92]
Do not be afraid
Do not be cynical
Continue to trust yourself and others
Continue to dream of collective liberation
—scott crow[93]
Perhaps it is more important to be in community, vulnerable and real and
whole, than to be right, or to be winning.
—adrienne maree brown[94]
It is clear that capitalism—administered by left- and right-wing
governments—is a disaster for people, non-humans, and the earth.
However, cynicism and disillusionment do not necessarily lead to revolt
or struggle. Empire’s capacity for decentralized control no longer
relies on legitimacy or faith. We do not have to believe capitalism is
good for us, or that the state will help and protect us, so long as we
remain enmeshed in Empire’s radical monopoly over life, from schooling
to law to the built environment that surrounds us.
In this chapter, we suggest that trust and responsibility are emerging
in Empire’s cracks. This is not about one way of trusting or a fixed set
of responsibilities, but about the proliferation of different forms. A
lot of what we get at in this chapter comes from carla’s longstanding
involvement in youth and kids’ liberation movements, which fundamentally
upend some of the basic assumptions embedded in many forms of
organizing. To create intergenerational spaces where kids can thrive
means holding space for play and emergence by warding off the twin
pitfalls of individualism and conformity. This requires nurturing a
baseline of trust, responsibility, and autonomy. We also draw on other
movements that we have learned from and been challenged by, including
Indigenous resurgence, transformative justice, and anti-violence, all of
which emphasize the importance of relationship-based trust and
responsibility.
Many of the most militant movements and insurrectionary spaces have
emphasized trust as an indispensable part of their capacity to resist
Empire and defend their insurgent forms of life. For instance, speaking
of autonomous spaces carved out by anarchists in Greece, Tasos Sagris
has suggested that “the main organizational form in Greece is
friendship. We believe that friendship will be revolutionary. Very
close, very good loving friends, that like each other, that spend their
lives together, they trust one another. This is a part of the
insurrection.”[95] Similarly, Marina Sitrin argues that “groups that are
grounded in trust and affect tend to be more militant. This is
especially true for the recuperated workplaces in Argentina, and they
reflect directly upon this. Knowing one another and working together for
years built up a trust that helped when the time came to defend their
workplaces physically (with molotovs, slingshots, etc).” Across North
America and beyond, many Indigenous peoples are clear that their
militancy stems from a responsibility to protect Indigenous land and
life, animated by grounded normativities that we explored in the last
chapter.
So what does it mean to nurture trust and responsibility? What do these
concepts even mean today? Often trust is a catch-all word that suggests
there is only one all-or-nothing way to trust, and this is part of the
problem. Similarly, responsibility can be turned into a reductive set of
stifling norms or duties. We want to walk with these questions: are
there different kinds of trust? What makes it possible to trust people
up front, without knowing them well? What does a joyful responsibility
look and feel like? How can trust and responsibility be conceived and
lived in ways that are open and enabling, rather than being imposed as
fixed moral duties?
We suggest that these transformative capacities are not based in rigid
ideologies or fixed ways of being. Joyful transformation is nurtured
through what Spinoza called common notions: shared values and
sensibilities that are flexible and based in relationships with human
and non-human others. The concept of common notions has been elaborated
by Gilles Deleuze and by a current of contemporary radical intellectuals
in Spain and Argentina, including Sebastián Touza, whom we interviewed
for this book.[96] Touza’s work explains that we might experience joy—a
growth in our powers—as a sudden flash, but be unsure what made it
possible or how to support more joyful encounters and relations. This is
the passive experience of joy. The passage from passivity to activity
happens through the formation of common notions: people figuring out
together what sustains transformation in their situations, and how to
move with it and participate in its unfolding. Common notions can never
be a fixed way of doing things or a guarantee that things will go well.
They can sound idealistic but in fact they are the opposite: they are
pragmatic sensibilities, material conceptions that arise out of
embodied, mutually enabling face-to-face relationships. Touza writes,
This is because, in Spinoza’s ethics, to have notions in common, people
require more than the sole agreement between the rational ideas that
come out of their minds. Common notions are formed in the local and
concrete terrain of affects that emerge in the encounter between bodies.
A common notion is a bond formed by reciprocal affect. Joy enables a
leap beyond the world of sad passions.[97]
Common notions are slippery because like joy itself, they emerge from
concrete, unique situations. To share them with others whose situations
are composed differently, then, is precarious and fraught. Detached from
the circumstances and practices that birthed them, common notions can
turn into moral commandments or stagnant habits, rather than ways of
relating that remain alive through struggle and care.
As common notions, trust and responsibility are emergent values
connected to specific practices, movements, and forms of life. A learned
trust—in situations, in others, and in one’s own capacities—is in this
sense an unfolding process. To trust in transformation is to undo fear
and control. Similarly, the forms of responsibility we are discussing
are not enshrined in law and formal agreements, but emerge instead
through a sense of feeling invited to participate in the world, care for
others and be cared for, support and be supported.
Working through trust and responsibility is difficult because both of
these words have been so thoroughly colonized by Empire. An important
place to begin, we think, is with the ways that Empire sows mistrust and
destroys our capacity for collective responsibility by making us
dependent on its destructive, depleting, violent ways of life.
Many people’s impulse is to mistrust others from the start, and it makes
sense, given that many of us have been living Hobbes’s dream, made real,
for centuries. Most everyone we know has been touched by some kind of
oppression and abuse, and Empire’s oppressive divisions often lead
people to betray even their most intimate relations. For instance,
feminists have coined the term “gaslighting” to get at a common
patriarchal dynamic that undermines the perceptions of women and femmes
by second-guessing, explaining away, and denying their experiences and
insights. Gaslighting can be subtle and unintentional, but as feminist
writer Nora Samaran explains, it is particularly insidious because it
undermines people’s trust in their own capacities:
If you think of the power, the strength, the capacity to effect change
that women who trust themselves are capable of, what we are losing when
we doubt ourselves is an indomitable force for social change that is
significant and therefore, to some, frightening. In other words, our
capacity to know ourselves is immensely powerful.[98]
All forms of oppression seem to have this tendency: racism,
heteropatriarchy, ableism, ageism, colonization, and other systems of
oppression contort people’s insights, experiences and differences into
weaknesses or deny them outright. For this reason, the emergence of
trust can be a powerful weapon, which is being recovered all the time
through struggle.
For many of us, mistrust in ourselves and others started when we were
kids, and in a lot of cases in our homes. When they’re really young,
kids are curious, open, vulnerable, and capable of radically trusting
those around them, and this tends to get sucked out of them from many
directions by Empire and the kinds of hierarchical and competitive
relationships it promotes. One of the most damaging forms of distrust is
built into modern disciplinary institutions, and schooling in
particular. As organizer and scholar Matt Hern writes,
At school children are always monitored, and schooled parents believe
that they should similarly be constantly monitoring their offspring, in
the name of safety. The last decades of this century has seen an
exponential growth in concern for children's daily safety, particularly
in cities, and most parents I come into contact with want to keep a very
close eye on their kids. This is a laudable concern, and one I share,
yet I have a deep suspicion of the equation that safety = surveillance.
There is a threshold where our concerned eye becomes over-monitoring and
disabling, an authoritarian presence shaping our kids’ lives.[99]
Hern is not singling out certain parents as oppressive, and he
implicates himself in this, too. He is pointing to the collective
inheritance of a way of life that divorces people from their capacities
to trust each other. The model for inculcating these values was (and is)
intense discipline and control: kids are encased in concrete for over a
decade, trained to sit still, memorize, and obey authority. As the
political theorist Toby Rollo has argued, it is no coincidence that
colonization, racism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism all tell stories
that constitute oppressed and dispossessed people as children.[100]
Empire conceives its Others as untrustworthy and lacking maturity,
health, morality, knowledge, civilization, and rationality, and so they
have all been targets for education, confinement, and control—or for
total eradication and genocide.
Ivan Illich was a prominent radical intellectual in the 1970s, but aside
from his radical critique of schooling, is not well-known today. For
Illich, modern schooling was only one of the many ways that dependence
was being entrenched—a dependence not only on capitalist production and
consumption, but on a whole violent, industrialized, disciplined, and
controlled way of life. His concept of radical monopoly points to
something more systematic than the control over a particular market by a
particular firm. Instead, radical monopoly gets at the way that Empire
monopolizes life itself: how people relate to each other, how they get
around, how they get their sustenance, and the whole texture of everyday
life. A world built for cars forces out other ways of moving, and modern
building codes and bylaws make it impossible and illegal for people to
build their own dwellings, or even to live together at all if they
cannot pass as a nuclear family. Modern medicine does not just create a
new way of understanding the body: its scientific understanding is
premised on a radical monopoly over health, and the subjugation (or
commodification) of other healing traditions. To be healthy under Empire
is to be a properly functioning, able-bodied, neurotypical individual
capable of work, and to be sick often means becoming medicalized:
isolated, confined, and dependent on strangers and experts. Law,
policing, and prisons monopolize the field of justice by enforcing
cycles of punishment and incarceration, forcing out the capacity of
people to protect each other and resolve conflicts themselves. The rise
of industrial agriculture has been accompanied by a loss of the
convivial relations surrounding subsistence: the connection to the
growing and processing of food, the intimacy with ecosystems and seasons
it entails, and the collective rituals, celebrations, and practices that
have accompanied these traditions. Empire’s infrastructure induces
dependence on forms of production, specialized knowledge, expertise, and
tools that detach people from their capacities to learn, grow, build,
produce, and take care of each other.
Since Illich wrote, these monopolies have folded into ever more diffuse
and generalized forms of control, sunk deeper into the fabric of life.
Deleuze called this new form of power taking shape over the course of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “control societies.”[101] Rather
than telling people exactly what to do, this mode of power regularizes
life, calling forth certain ways of living and feeling, and making other
forms of life die. Surveillance no longer ends when one exits a
particular institution: through social media, smartphones, browsing
histories, and credit cards, surveillance is ubiquitous, continuous, and
increasingly participatory. We are enjoined to share, consume, and
express ourselves, and every choice feeds back into algorithms that
predict our habits and preferences with ever increasing precision. The
performance of self-expression is constantly encouraged, and as the
Institute for Precarious Consciousness writes, “Our success in this
performance in turn affects everything from our ability to access human
warmth to our ability to access means of subsistence, not just in the
form of the wage but also in the form of credit.”[102] Under this
apparatus, there is little room for silence, nuance, listening,
exploration, or the rich subtleties of tone and body language. Anything
too intense or subversive is either incorporated or surgically removed
by security, police, or emergency personnel. Class, anti-Blackness,
Islamophobia, ableism and other structured forms of violence are coded
into the algorithms that make everyone a potential terrorist, thief, or
error. Even those who are supposed to enjoy the most—those who can
afford the newest screens and the most expensive forms of
consumption—are inducted into a state of nearly constant distraction,
numbness, and anxiety.
Perpetual individualization obscures the crushing collective effects of
Empire. When this form of control is working, interactions are
hypervisible, superficial, predictable, and self-managed. To be
constantly mistrusted and controlled is also to be detached from one’s
own capacity to experiment, make mistakes, and learn without instruction
or coercion. To internalize the responsibilities of neoliberal
individualism is to sink into the mesh of control and subjection. The
responsible economic subject owns her own property, pays her own debts,
invests in her future, and meets her needs and desires through
consumption. She is individually responsible for her health, her
economic situation, her life prospects, and even her emotional states.
These forms of subjection make it difficult to imagine—let alone
participate in—collective alternatives. From the dependence on armed
strangers to resolve conflicts, to the hum of an extraction-fuelled
world, to the glow of screens that beckon attention, to the stranglehold
of policy and bureaucracy, to the intergenerational violence and abuse
that permeate lovers and families, Empire is constantly entrenching
dependence on a world that makes joy, trust, and responsibility
difficult.
It is not a question of revealing this to people, as if they are dupes.
Struggling amid these forms of control means grappling with their
affective hold on us and our daily lives. Anxiety, addiction, and
depression are not merely secrets to reveal or illusions to dispel.
Preaching about Empire’s horrors can stoke cynicism or ironic detachment
rather than undoing subjection. One can still feel bound and depleted,
despite one’s awareness. Empire’s subjects are “free” to be mistrustful
and resentful of the system under which they live. One can hate Empire
as much as one wants, as long as one continues to work, pay rent, and
consume. There is no simple correspondence between intentions and
actions, as if the problem is simply figuring out what to do and doing
it. Undoing subjection is not about conscious opposition, or finding a
way to be happy amidst misery. Challenging Empire’s radical monopoly
over life means interrupting its affective and infrastructural hold,
undoing some of our existing attachments and desires, and creating new
ones.
Most people who have lived through any moment where formal institutions
of power go away, or are forced away, agree with this point. When left
alone, when left with one another, people turn to one another and use
forms of mutual aid and support. The wake of the break is a beautiful
opening up of possibility.”
—Marina Sitrin[103]
At Empire’s edges, in its cracks, people are finding each other,
recovering subjugated knowledges, revaluing their own traditions,
pushing back against discipline and control. In dramatic uprisings and
slow shifts, people are reconnecting with their own powers and
capacities to make, act, live, and fight together. Conviviality is the
name that Illich gives to ways of life that promote flourishing, which
are being squeezed out by Empire:
I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial
productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse
among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment;
and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the
demands made upon them by others and by a man-made environment. I
consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal
interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value.[104]
Illich’s conception of conviviality resonates with the relational form
of freedom we explored in the last chapter. Conviviality names the
creative relationships that emerge between people and their material
surroundings, sustained by grassroots trust and responsibility.[105] In
other words, it is Illich’s name for joy sustained by common notions.
Conviviality helps clarify that joy is not simply something felt by an
individual, but the effect of enabling assemblages of bodies, tools,
gestures, and relationships. It is not about a utopian future or a
romantic past, but about breaking from dependence on Empire’s stifling
infrastructures. This is most evident after natural disasters and during
insurrections, when some of Empire’s radical monopolies are dramatically
short-circuited.
While these situations often trigger elite fear-mongering and fascist
vigilantism, they are also spaces where joyful and convivial forms of
life blossom, as people discover—in haphazard, decentralized, and
emergent ways—how to live without Empire’s crushing monopolies. Here is
what one anonymous participant had to say about their experience of the
uprising in Cairo, Egypt, where people famously took over Tahrir Square:
Cairo was never more alive than during the first Tahrir Square. Since
nothing was functioning anymore, everyone took care of what was around
them. People took charge of the garbage collecting, swept the walkways
and sometimes even repainted them; they drew frescos on the walls and
they looked after each other. Even the traffic had become miraculously
fluid, since there were no more traffic controllers. What we suddenly
realized is that we had been robbed of our simplest gestures, those that
make the city ours and make it something we belong to. At Tahrir Square,
people would arrive and spontaneously ask themselves what they could do
to help. They would go to the kitchen, or to stretcher the wounded, work
on banners or shields or slingshots, join discussions, make up songs. We
realized that the state organization was actually the maximum
disorganization, because it depended on negating the human ability to
self-organize. At Tahrir, no one gave any orders. Obviously, if someone
had got it in their heads to organize all that, it would have
immediately turned into chaos.[106]
Similar accounts can be found by people who have lived through disasters
and insurrections throughout the world. For example, the upwelling of
autonomy, experimentation, and joy was palpable in the Argentinean
uprising that began in 2001. While corporate media and politicians
framed it as a chaotic, short-lived riot, Marina Sitrin has shown how
autonomous forms of life have endured, despite challenges, for over a
decade.[107] Workers have taken over factories and learned to run them
collectively, without bosses, through a process of autogestion, or
worker self-management. This is not merely a transition from top-down
factory production to cooperative production, but a process of
transformative struggle in which whole neighborhoods defended factories
against police and capitalists. Similarly, the neighborhood assemblies
that formed through the uprising have created new ways for people to
resolve conflicts and support each other without relying on the state.
Anywhere that Empire’s form of life is suspended, emergent capacities to
live otherwise rush in. Through struggle and experimentation, people
formulate problems and respond to them together, taking responsibility
for collective work and care, and bonds of trust take hold.
Rebecca Solnit speaks to the emergence of conviviality and joy amid
disasters in her book A Paradise Built in Hell:
In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people
are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those
around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.
The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressive savage human being has
little truth to it.[108]
Solnit documents and interviews the survivors of several disasters,
including earthquakes and hurricanes, economic collapses, and terrorist
attacks. Consistently she finds that in the wake of disaster it is
mainly elites who panic and resort to violence. Furthermore,
bureaucratic disaster relief tends to entrench misery and despair. At
the same time, in the midst of intense suffering and pain, large numbers
of people engage in mutual aid and solidarity. In fact, many people
reflect on their experiences of earthquakes, hurricanes, and even
bombings as joyful experiences in the Spinozan sense, in which they feel
more alive and connected to others. Without top-down organization or
bureaucracies, they coordinate food and medical supplies, take care of
injured and sick people, and defend themselves in ways that are
decentralized but not disorganized.
Why is there joy in disaster? Solnit suggests that it is because
Empire’s debilitating monopolies on life are suspended: “If paradise now
arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and
the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act in another
way.”[109] Solnit is not arguing that we should wish for disasters. What
her argument exposes is that everyday life under Empire is already a
certain kind of ongoing and seemingly intractable disaster, in a world
where distraction, anxiety, individualism, and dependence have become
normalized. What is enlivening about disasters is the emergent capacity
they unleash for trust, responsibility, care, and simply being present
and feeling connected.
The upwelling of conviviality and joyful forms of life is only one
tendency among others in situations where control is abated. Alongside
these are other tendencies: waves of sexualized violence, hoarding,
bunkerism, fascist vigilantes, intimidation and violence from military
and police, and desires for control based in fear and mistrust. To
reinstall its rhythms, Empire must turn these moments into situations of
extreme deprivation and violence so that its subjects can only
experience the suspension of control as a horrifying prospect. The
bubbling up of decentralized, convivial forms of life must be crushed as
quickly as possible and “order” must be restored. In this sense,
Empire’s means of counterinsurgency include not only police repression
but also the liquidation of emergent orders, the stoking of divisions
and terror, and the reinstallation of individualizing and isolating
forms of life. People go back to their jobs, their houses, their
smartphones, and control returns.
But never completely. A key question is how to keep these relations
alive in everyday life, even as Empire’s stultifying rhythms are
reimposed. Among the stakes in these struggles, as we have suggested, is
their potential to elicit responsiveness as people are drawn out of
themselves and their routines. In an interview with Naomi Klein, Leanne
Simpson insists that responsibility and reciprocity are the alternatives
to settler colonial extractivism:
Naomi: If extractivism is a mindset, a way of looking at the world, what
is the alternative?
Leanne: Responsibility. Because I think when people extract things,
they’re taking and they’re running and they’re using it for just their
own good. What’s missing is the responsibility. If you’re not developing
relationships with the people, you’re not giving back, you’re not
sticking around to see the impact of the extraction. You’re moving to
someplace else. The alternative is deep reciprocity. It’s respect, it’s
relationship, it’s responsibility, and it’s local. If you’re forced to
stay in your 50-mile radius, then you very much are going to experience
the impacts of extractivist behavior. The only way you can shield
yourself from that is when you get your food from around the world or
from someplace else. So the more distance and the more globalization
then the more shielded I am from the negative impacts of extractivist
behavior.[110]
To be more responsible and self-reliant in this way is not to inhabit
the neoliberal ideal of the individual, nor an isolationist
independence. Protecting ecosystems and non-human life from devastation
is often cast in terms of conservation, austerity, or a new mode of
management. But these tendencies exist in tension with the grassroots
recovery and reinvention of ways of living that support human and
non-human life, through ongoing and intimate contact with natural
processes. This is not about protecting a separate “environment” but
nurturing forms of life that persist through interdependent
relationships: soil, water, plants, and animals are not resources to be
exploited or managed, but an interconnected web that people can
participate in and enrich. As people regain intimate contact with the
places where they live, they get to know the way the water flows when it
rains, the plants that grow up together and how they are used by birds
and wasps and bees, the way that the sun warms a south-facing slope
where different plants thrive.
This brings abstract concepts like climate change and biodiversity loss
down to a practical scale, felt through interactions with the sensible
world rather than intellectualized through statistics. Supporting these
relationships might entail intense grief and rage: one discovers that a
childhood hideout among trees has been paved over; the absence of
once-familiar birds and bees is felt; one finds cancerous fish and
dried-up creeks. There are overwhelming and heartbreaking changes taking
place, and being connected to communities of plants and animals makes it
as painful as it is nourishing. It is from this place that joyful
responses to ecological catastrophes are emerging. Not happy or
optimistic responses, but capacities to respond to the horrors in ways
based in lived and ever-changing relationships.
In North America, the recovery of responsibility and interconnectedness
is expressed most deeply and forcefully in Indigenous resurgence and
other struggles where people are reasserting a profound land-based
knowledge, revaluing traditions that have accrued through generations of
reciprocal relationships with land. It is no coincidence that Indigenous
peoples have been behind the most durable and militant resistance to
ecological devastation, including pipelines, dams, logging, tar sands,
fracking, and other forms of resource extraction. To be immersed in a
web of reciprocal relationships is also to feel the responsibility to
protect that web.
The Unist’ot’en Camp, for instance, is an Indigenous-led project that
for years has been successfully resisting proposed fracked gas pipelines
that would cross the territories of the Wet’suwet’en people in British
Columbia. The grassroots Wet’suwet’en people leading the project have
been clear that they are not protesting pipelines but reasserting their
traditional responsibilities to take care of their territories, and
re-establishing traditional protocols for entry. Several years ago, they
created a checkpoint and began turning away those working for surveyors
and others involved in pipeline construction, while inviting thousands
of supporters onto their territories. Mel Bazil, a long-term supporter
and a Gitxsan relative of the Unist’ot’en clan, speaks to the power of
these land-based responsibilities:
It’s a reciprocal culture; it never really ended … To share that
knowledge outwardly to other grassroots folks—migrants and grassroots
settlers, as well as other Indigenous nations—it’s been very, very
powerful to see our people come together. Not just in the face of
devastation and destruction, but to survive and to understand each
other.[111]
Not only have they been successful in halting pipeline construction; in
the process, the Unist’ot’en Camp has constructed permaculture gardens,
a healing center, and hosted annual action camps where hundreds of
Indigenous and non-Indigenous supporters come from across North America
(and elsewhere) to connect with each other, explore affinities, and
deepen networks of trust and mutual support.
Similar processes are taking place at other camps across territories
claimed by British Columbia and beyond, including the Madii Lii Camp and
Lax Kw’alaams’s defense of Lelu Island, both part of a network of
frontlines committed to stopping pipelines and fracked gas expansion.
Furthermore, as we write this, there is a local and worldwide
proliferation of solidarity actions, fundraisers, and on-the-ground
support for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the Dakota
Access Pipeline.
Among non-Indigenous people, we also see expressions of land-connected
responsibilities in the spread of communal gardening, environmental and
climate justice, permaculture, regenerative farming, grassroots
bioremediation, resistance to resource extraction, and animal liberation
struggles, among others. Many of these struggles are simultaneously
fighting the ecological devastation of Empire and its brutal forms of
control and exploitation while making space for convivial forms of life.
This renewal of collective responsibility and trust can also be seen in
feminist, anti-violence, and transformative justice movements that
address interpersonal violence in ways that undo the monopoly of
policing and courts. A crucial insight from these movements is that
listening to, believing, and trusting survivors of violence is powerful,
undermining a culture that normalizes violence and blames survivors of
rape and abuse for the ways they have been hurt. The capacity of
survivors to trust themselves and each other is often the beginning of
community-based responses through which people take collective
responsibility for confronting and transforming patterns of violence.
The work of these movements has led to a proliferation of networks of
mutual support and care, and the creation of alternatives to police,
courts, and prisons that exacerbate violence and oppression. In North
America, these initiatives have been led by BIPOC women, Two-Spirit,
queer, and trans people, in particular, whose communities have been
targeted with criminalization and incarceration since the inception of
policing and prisons. As INCITE! and Critical Resistance organizers
write,
The reliance on the criminal justice system has taken power away from
women’s ability to organize collectively to stop violence and has
invested this power within the state. The result is that women who seek
redress in the criminal justice system feel disempowered and alienated.
It has also promoted an individualistic approach toward ending violence
such that the only way people think they can intervene in stopping
violence is to call the police. This reliance has shifted our focus from
developing ways communities can collectively respond to violence.[112]
In this context, “transformative justice” (TJ) has emerged as an
alternative to “restorative justice” models. Its emphasis on
transformation is based on the insight that—especially among Black and
Indigenous communities—violence is structural and institutional, without
a baseline that could be “restored.” Instead, as lawyer and
anti-violence organizer Rachel Zellars explains, it works pragmatically
from existing relationships to interrupt institutional and interpersonal
cycles of violence, disposability, and punishment:
[Transformative justice] centres Black women’s experiences of violence
while resisting the notion that speaking about violence detracts from
organizing: men who cause harm can be understood simultaneously as
effective or well-loved organizers and as perpetrators of misogynistic
violence. In this sense, TJ is open-armed – naming violence committed
while leaving room for those who have caused harm to be accountable and
to come back into the fold.”[113]
Transformative justice and anti-violence are also linked to struggles
for migrant justice, anti-gentrification, and prison abolition. In
Halifax, Nova Scotia, women refugees created an informal support group
and drop-in center for those in their community facing domestic abuse,
which led to a cooperative catering business and a childcare network
that helped address the poverty and isolation that was recreating the
conditions for violence.[114] In 2004 anti-violence advocate Mimi Kim
founded Creative Interventions, an organization dedicated to sharing
grassroots responses to interpersonal violence and lessons from these
attempts.[115] Forged in alliance and conversation with prison
abolitionist movements, they encourage reliance on friends, family,
neighbors, and coworkers as alternatives to professional services or
policing. Their flexible approach acknowledges that people may want to
remain in their relationships or the places where they live, centering
the needs of survivors while working towards the transformation of the
situation that led to the violence.
By enacting alternatives to cops and courts, these initiatives nurture
autonomy in place of racist, heteropatriarchal institutions, undoing the
culture in which both survivors and perpetrators are made disposable and
institutional violence is obscured. Everyone we know who is involved in
these efforts to end cycles of violence can attest to how fraught,
messy, and difficult they can be. They do not always go well.
Nonetheless, this is the kind of “freedom” discussed in the last
chapter: the capacity to work on relationships, to become more active in
undoing oppressive patterns, and to nurture and deepen trust and
collective responsibility.
A third convivial current is deschooling and youth liberation, and the
proliferation of alternatives to schooling that are led by kids and
youth, including those who are in school. The Purple Thistle, co-created
with youth in Vancouver, Canada, has been a vibrant example of this: it
nurtured a space for youth not only to hang out, but to experiment and
learn together without being controlled and supervised, to take
collective responsibility for running the space, and to build strong
bonds with each other.
The youth-run projects included a community garden, screenprinting,
photography, graffiti, zine publishing, discussion groups, filmmaking,
animation, film nights, a radical library, sound and music recording,
graphic design, fiber and textile arts, and more. These initiatives were
emergent, based on people’s desires and priorities. carla was the
“director” of the Thistle from 2009 until it closed in spring 2015, but
her job was basically to do the bulk of the paper work, support and
mentor when asked, and to work as kind of matchmaker connecting youth to
mentors and apprenticeships both formal and informal. Overall, carla’s
role as director was to function as an anchor to support the fluid and
flexible relationships at the heart of the Thistle. Other adults also
supported the Thistle as anchors, co-directors, and mentors, but all
day-to-day decisions were made by the youth-run collective and the
various pods that sprang from it. As Matt Hern, Thistle co-founder and
director before carla, said of the project,
I like to think of the Thistle as being really easy in the way that
school is hard and really hard in the way that school is easy. So, you
go to school for example, or you go to a workplace, or you go to many
institutions, you know exactly what you have to do, you know what's
expected of you, you don't really have to think a whole lot. And that's
nice sometimes; you just walk through it: essentially just follow orders
and do what you're told and you'll be fine. So it's really easy in lots
of ways. It's also very difficult because that's really hard for most
people, and because you fight against it and you resist, but the Thistle
turns that on its ass in lots of ways. So it's really easy because no
one is telling you what to do, you can do whatever you like, you can
come and go as you like, you can figure out how you can access it. So
it's very easy but it's also very difficult, ‘cause that's a tremendous
kind of responsibility.[116]
The Thistle can be understood as a counter-institution, a flexible
container where the participants themselves shaped roles and
responsibilities in an open, experimental way. Such counter-institutions
can prefigure trust and conviviality, creating space where these ways of
relating can be tried out, become patterns and habits, and eventually
take hold in new communities and projects.
Many of these relationships ran outside the walls of the Thistle, but
were nevertheless vital for creating webs of care and mutual aid. For
example, when individuals or groups found themselves in dicey or
difficult situations, folks could lean on each other rather than call
the cops. Often this meant supporting someone to get the care they
actually needed instead of being thrown into the criminal system. Other
times it meant creating space for accountability to take hold. These
forms of trust and responsibility never crystallized into a public
website, handbook, or formal organization; they were relational and ad
hoc. We think that people are doing this all the time. In fact, in order
to keep it safer for many to engage in these ways, and to hold onto
these values as common notions, institutionalization or publicity is
often avoided.
I think we cannot have any kind of trust in a mass of 100 million
individuals, they will produce the horror. But if we bring everything to
the human scale, to the communities, to small groups of people, then we
can really trust that the people will have the wisdom to discuss and to
generate consensus.
—Gustavo Esteva[117]
We have argued that Empire’s institutions are a ceaseless attack on
conviviality, and we want to hold onto emergent forms of trust and
responsibility as common notions. In this context, we want to share an
excerpt from our interview with Kelsey Cham C.:
carla and Nick: Can you talk about the potential of trusting folks up
front, and how you saw it play out at the Thistle?
Kelsey: Yeah totally, I think that’s awesome. Actually I think you
[carla] were one of the first people to actually trust me without even
knowing me. And I was like what the hell? Why? Why? How do you know I’m
not gonna just fuck everything up and run away and steal a bunch of
money and go? How do you know that? But in trusting me, I was like, holy
shit: I trust this situation and this collective twenty times more and I
want to give back to it because I’ve been given this opportunity to do
something that I’ve never been able to do before, which is awesome. But
I have been thinking about trust and how with trauma we build all these
walls and we start to mistrust everything—I have a pretty hard time
trusting people—there’s a point where I’m like this is too personal and
too intimate and now my walls are going to go up. I was sitting and
thinking about how it’s probably one of the best ways to break down the
walls of the system is to break down the walls around each other first,
and I think the only way we can break down those walls is with trust.
And that’s the core thing you said.
Joyful militancy and trust, and compassion, and humility are all tied
together: in other cultures, traditional cultures—I don’t know a lot
about this—but from what I know, older Indigenous cultures have these
ideas of respect, humility, compassion, and I think in karate I���ve seen
it and it’s funny because karate is a martial art, a fighting tool, and
one of the things that we learn is that we have to love everyone
including our opponents. And that’s the toughest thing to say in this
community. People are like, “what the fuck, how can you say that, you
can’t just love your abuser.” And it’s true, I can’t just let go of
everything. It’s not that, it’s being compassionate, I think, to
situations.
carla and Nick: Can we have the expectation of trust up front? Is it an
alternative to the idea that trust always needs to be earned?
Kelsey: Yeah that’s like our society: you gotta earn everything; you
earn money, you build trust, and respect. You gotta prove to me that I
should trust you, or respect you. And that’s an interesting point; I
have a tough time with that, trusting people. But I think it’s a
feedback system: probably the more you allow yourself to trust people
initially, probably the more well-reciprocated that will be. I felt it:
you trust me and I didn’t understand it. That’s how fucked up our system
is. Even though I didn’t do anything wrong, or to harm you, I didn’t
understand how someone could trust me without knowing me first.[118]
At the core of this conversation is the potential—never an obligation or
guarantee—of trusting people up front. In a practical sense, it’s our
experience that when people offer trust up front, most people rise to
the occasion. Without turning it into a commandment that everyone should
follow, we want to affirm the ways that expanding up-front trust can be
transformative and enabling. It can feel strange and scary to be in
situations where people think well of us and trust us to do our best,
without having to “earn it” or “prove it,” but it also can be incredibly
freeing, making us feel more capable. This is a trust not only in
individuals, but in unfolding processes with open-ended potential,
without fixed rules. In this sense, it is trust in joy: in emergent
capacities to increase collective powers of acting.
But what does this look like? It happens in all kinds of subtle,
relational ways. One of the things that made the Thistle different from
many other youth projects was that everyone in the collective had keys
to the space and were free to use them anytime. No one had to go through
a formal interview process, or sign over their life to have a set. Many
bureaucratic procedures like this are based in distrust, as are many
radical spaces that replicate institutional norms of Empire. But this
up-front trust also entailed responsibility: it required that folks met
regularly to check in, talk about how things were going, and so on.
These practices helped to create an environment of shared connection and
kindness, a space filled with friendship and mutual support, and
ultimately a place to build community.
When we have been involved in movements, spaces, and forms of life
imbued with this sense of trust, along with a fierce sense of mutual
responsibility, we have noticed that it gave us an ability to be brave,
to try new things, to be vulnerable, and to take risks. This is not a
politics of “let’s all get along” pacifism. Writing in the context of
collective resistance to evictions in the United States, Sitrin argues
that trust is intimately connected to direct action:
It is not only about changing relationships and “feeling good” but
inextricably linked to direct action. It is about creating the
alternatives that we now desire and need. It is using the base of trust
so as to occupy homes and prevent foreclosures and evictions, all the
while knowing that to call on one’s neighbor means they will come out
and support you—as has been done many hundreds of times throughout the
US in only the past few months. People doing eviction defense in support
of their neighbors even speak of how they might not have “liked” that
particular person, but that they “felt” a connection to them and cared
so much about what happened to them that they were risking possible
arrest by putting their bodies between the marshals and the person’s
home. From these relationships, in dozens and dozens of neighborhoods
and communities across the country, networks of support and care have
been formed. Neighbors go door-to-door to let others know that they can
(and will) be defended if they need it, and also to just share stories,
food, and support.[119]
These conceptions of care, trust, and openness are not new ideas. On the
contrary, Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Prakash argue that what they call
hospitality—a radical openness, generosity, and trust in others—is
common among many traditions that have not been lost to bureaucratic
institutions, industrial dependence, and other trappings of
“development.” Among those less entangled in Empire’s radical
monopolies, hospitality remains alive:
Common people learn to trust each other and be trustworthy in ways that
are rapidly vanishing among the “social minorities.” Their common faith
is seldom deposited in abstract causes or phantoms, like human kind.
Instead, it is entrusted to real men and women, defining the place to
which they belong and that belongs to them. Rather than the private hope
and public despair of the “social minorities” (some hope for their
personal lives, no hope for public affairs) …we usually find expressed
among them a common hope in their own capacity to deal with their
predicaments, whether good, bad or indifferent. Given that condition,
they can be both hospitable and responsible.[120]
The notion of hospitality is not just about welcoming guests; it
connotes a sensibility of trust based on people’s sense of their
capacity to face the world together. Being held in this way also enables
people to be open to strangers: not simply “tolerant” but capable of
open-ended encounters, generosity, and curiosity. To encounter a
stranger and be open to difference in this way is not at all the same as
tolerance. Liberal tolerance treats individuals as atomized entities who
are required to put up with each other, with the state as a universal
arbiter. Hospitality starts not from rights-bearing individuals but from
a sensuous and lively world, composed through common notions that have
evolved to sustain joy or conviviality. To be “hosted” is to be allowed
to encounter a world, to be invited into it. For the same reason, it is
not individuals who are trusting; there is no self-enclosed individual
who “chooses” to trust, but bundles of relationships in which the
capacity for trust is activated and drawn out of people.
This is not a romanticization of “premodern” or “preindustrial”
cultures, but a recognition that Empire’s radical monopolies are uneven
and contested. Esteva and Prakash insist that people are always
recovering, sustaining, and reinventing convivial forms of life. This
can be seen in insurrectionary spaces, in disasters, in a whole
multiplicity of projects and struggles: anywhere that people find the
capacity to formulate problems together and carve out some wiggle room
from Empire’s monopoly over life.
Trust and responsibility are composed differently based in the contexts
from which they emerge. They can be conceived as a set of questions,
including the capacity to selectively extend trust across the divisions
of race, class, sex, gender, colonization, ability, age, and other forms
of oppression and division.
There are good reasons why trust may be difficult. Distrust is often
based on experiences of abuse, violation, or being used or taken
advantage of. A lot of women, genderqueer, and trans folks don’t trust
cis-gendered men; people of color are often wary of white people, and
Indigenous people refuse to trust settlers. These are not ideological
prejudices, but strategies of survival.
Moreover, to talk about trust and responsibility can sound naïve or just
plain stupid in a world in which individual responsibility is callously
imposed and so much violence happens to trusting people. At the same
time, we want to recognize that people are constantly building trust
across these divisions, in ways that open potentials for new
relationships. In this sense, a crucial component of joyful militancy is
a collective capacity to build, maintain, and repair trust, which may
entail taking responsibility for harm, disrespect, or complicity with
Empire in ways that we may not have anticipated. Richard Day suggests
that many anti-authoritarian currents today are animated by what he
calls “infinite responsibility”:
This means that as individuals, as groups, we can never allow ourselves
to think that we are “done”, that we have identified all of the sites,
structures, and processes of oppression “out there” or “in here”, inside
our own individual and group identities. Infinite responsibility means
always being ready to hear another other, a subject who by definition
does not “exist”, indeed must not exist (be heard) if current relations
of power are to be maintained.[121]
In this sense, the questions of what we are responsible for, whom we are
responsible to, and what we can be held accountable for are always open,
ethical questions. This does not mean that they will be completely
revised at any second, but that they are never completely fixed, held
open by an ethical responsiveness. Responsibility is infinite in the
sense that it is unbounded: we can harm each other in unforeseen ways,
and infinite responsibility gestures at the potential of remaining
responsive to this. As a way of furthering this line of thought,
responsibility could be broken apart into response-ability. Writer and
facilitator Zainab Amadahy writes,
Responsibility in this sense is not a burden but something that actually
enhances our life experience. The word literally means “ability to
respond.” In the relational framework we might understand responsibility
as the ability to respond appropriately – that is, for the common good.
In this sense, responsibility is seen as preferable to individualism,
which doesn’t really exist.[122]
This “common good” is not an abstract good based in Western morality.
For Amadahy, it is based in attunement to human and non-human
relationships and the capacity to support them. Following this line,
responsibility is ethical rather than moral. As soon as answers to these
questions become permanent, the ethical moment is gone, and one cannot
be responsive to relationships in motion.
Like all common notions, trust and responsibility are not guarantees
that things will go well, or that oppression and violence will not
happen. Trust, hospitality, and openness are precious and important
precisely because they entail incredible courage and risk, especially in
the context of Empire, with its many layers of violence and control. For
this reason, Esteva and Prakash write that “nothing is more treacherous
than that which violates hospitality.”[123] To be open and vulnerable
entails the risk of being hurt and betrayed in ways that we cannot be if
we are on guard or closed-off. Pointing to the need for openness is not
an injunction to remain open to everything. Instead, it is another
open-ended ethical question about where, when, with whom, and how to be
open and trusting.
Trust and responsibility are slippery for a number of reasons. They are
not simply the result of rational thinking, or even a combination of
theory and practice, because they are implicated in affect: they come
out of thinking and feeling the transformative encounters with our own
power and the powers of others.
This is part of why it is so important to hold onto trust and
responsibility as common notions rather than prescriptions. Common
notions emerge from the upwellings of joy that make them possible, as
people (re)learn together how to nurture convivial forms of life. To
turn trust into an imperative is to rob it of this potential. Still,
even among the people who generated them, common notions can be
converted into rigid doctrines that drain away joyful transformation,
rather than supporting it. This happens when certainty arises about the
only way forward; when “trust me” and “take responsibility” become
injunctions. This turns them into dead words, lifted from the tangle of
transformative movement that brought them into being. Common notions can
only be held gently, as flexible ideas whose power lives within the
relationships and processes they sustain.
The slippage from common notions to set principles is all too common
among radical movements and milieus, especially in North America. We
think this slippage is connected to the phenomenon of rigid radicalism
that we discussed in our introduction and explore more deeply in the
next chapter.
Capitalism, colonialism and heteropatriarchy make us sick. Are our
responses healing us? Are our actions generating wellbeing for others?
Or are we unintentionally reproducing the kind of relationships that
made us sick in the first place?
—Zainab Amadahy[124]
Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface
everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way
persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.
—Emma Goldman[125]
There is something that circulates in many radical spaces, movements,
and milieus that saps their power from within. It is the pleasure of
feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical
enough; the sad comfort of sorting unfolding events into dead
categories; the vigilant apprehension of errors and complicities in
oneself and others; the anxious posturing on social media with the highs
of being liked and the lows of being ignored; the suspicion and
resentment felt in the presence of something new; the way curiosity
feels naïve and condescension feels right. We can sense its emergence at
certain times, when we feel the need to perform in certain ways, hate
the right things, and make the right gestures. Above all, it is hostile
to difference, curiosity, openness, and experimentation.
This phenomenon cannot be exhaustively described, because it is always
mutating and recirculating. The problem is not simply that people are
unaware of it—we think it is common among those touched by radical
milieus. As the anarchist researcher and organizer Chris Dixon writes,
Whenever this topic comes up in discussions, I’ve found it quickly
evokes head nods and horror stories about takedowns on social media,
organizational territorialism, activist social status hierarchies,
sectarian posturing, and a general atmosphere of radical
self-righteousness.[126]
It can be risky to discuss all this publicly; there is always the chance
that one will be cast as a liberal, an oppressor, or a reactionary. For
this reason, these conversations are happening between people who
already trust each other enough to know that they will not be met with
immediate suspicion or attack. Here there is room for questioning and
listening, with space for subtlety, nuance, and care that is so often
absent when rigid radicalism takes hold. These are some of the questions
we have been asking in our research: What is this force? What are its
contours, and what are its sources? What triggers it, and what makes it
spread? How can it be warded off, and how are people activating other
ways of being?
Rigid radicalism is both a fixed way of being and a way of fixing. It
fixes in the sense of attempting to repair, seeing emergent movements as
inherently flawed. To fix is to see lack everywhere, and treat struggles
and projects as broken and insufficient. It also fixes in the sense of
fastening or making permanent, converting fluid practices into set ways
of being, stagnating their transformative potential. Even though
unfolding practices might appear identical to each other from a
distance, habits and certainties can take over from what was once
experimental and lively. When rigidity and suspicion take over, joy dies
out.
This is probably our bleakest chapter, focusing as it does on the
contours of rigid radicalism and how it circulates. We want to offer up
some ideas about how this all works, but we are not trying to pin it
down once and for all. We have been reading about this phenomenon,
talking with friends, and interviewing people, and so we hope to
contribute to a conversation that we know is ongoing. We want to tell
stories about it, not the story. We do not think there is any single
cause, or a single response.
In our first attempts at writing about this, and in many of our
interviews, we used the concept of “sad militancy” to describe this
phenomenon, but we have abandoned the term because it has not worked for
some people we talked to. Drawing on Spinoza’s conception of sadness as
stagnation, the notion of sad militancy has been circulating for a
while, especially in Latin America. Nevertheless, we have noticed that
it can easily be interpreted instead as a pathologization or
condemnation of depression or sorrow. Furthermore we use the word
“radicalism” because we want to avoid creating a dichotomy between two
types of militancy. Rigid radicalism is not the “opposite” of joyful
militancy; they are two different processes, animated by distinct
affects.
It is a bit scary to write about these tendencies. Throughout the
process of writing this book, we have come up against the worry that it
will be decided we got it wrong: that we are reactionaries, or liberals,
or oppressive in some way that we had not anticipated. Someone will
reveal that we do not have “good politics,” that the book is too
theoretical, or not theoretical enough, or romantic, or full of hippy
shit, or naïve, or misleading, or problematic, or liberal, or useless,
or, or, or. We will have committed our ridiculous ideas to print, in a
permanent humiliation. For us, this fear exposes the durability of rigid
radicalism, and how it can trigger paranoia, impose self-censorship and
conformity, and encourage a kind of detached self-righteousness.
These conversations are already happening frequently. Rigid radicalism
is a public secret: something that people already sense but which
nonetheless maintains its affective hold.[127] It structures desires and
movements in disempowering ways despite our awareness, and keeps us
stuck in loops of anxiety, fear, suspicion, and certainty. As such, it
cannot be attacked head-on.
When this public secret is discussed, it is all too easily converted
into a moralistic argument, targeting individuals or groups: the problem
is those rigid radicals, out there, separate from us. Some criticisms of
rigid radicalism set themselves apart from or above it, as if they are
the ones who truly see, and rigid radicals are trapped in a fog. The
problem is that this critique repeats a common stance of rigid
radicalism itself: someone holds a truth and brings it to others in need
of enlightenment. We hope to approach rigid radicalism differently,
while recognizing that it is easy to slip into, to stoke, and to
activate.
Like joyful militancy, rigid radicalism cannot be reduced to certain
people or behaviors. It is not that there are a bunch of assholes out
there stifling movements and imploding worlds. In fact, this vigilant
search for flawed people or behaviors—and the exposure of them
everywhere—can be part of rigid radicalism itself. As a public secret,
there is no point in shouting about it. It is more like a gas:
continually circulating, working on us behind our backs, and guiding us
towards rigidities, closures, and hostility.
No one is immune to it, just as no one is immune to being pulled into
liberalism and other patterns of Empire. The air makes us cough
certainties: some feel provoked, and attack or shrink away; others push
cough medicine; but none of this stops anyone from getting sicker. For
us at least, there is no cure, no gas mask, no unitary solution. There
are only openings, searches, and the collective discovery of new and old
ways of moving that let in fresh air. And for the same reason that no
one is immune, anyone can participate in its undoing.
To confront rigid radicalism effectively, we think, is not to pin it
down and attack it, but to understand it so that we can learn to
dissipate it. Because these tendencies are linked to fear, anxiety,
shame—to our very desires and sense of who we are and what we are
becoming—we think it is important to approach all of this with care and
compassion. It also requires recognizing and making the other tendencies
palpable: rigid radicalism is always already coming apart, and joy is
always already emerging. Ultimately, we think that rigidity is undone by
activating, stoking, and intensifying joy, and defending it with
militancy and gentleness; in other words, figuring out how to transform
our own situations, treat each other well, listen to each other,
experiment, and fight together.
Where does rigid radicalism come from? Surely there are a multiplicity
of sources. Ultimately, we think it is an inheritance of Empire. It has
been suggested to us that rigid radicalism is primarily a Euro-colonial
phenomenon: that is, it is most intense in spaces where whiteness,
heteropatriarchy, and colonization have the strongest hold.[128] These
divisions induce habits of relating based in crisis and lack, as
capitalism constantly pits people and groups in competition with each
other. But rigid radicalism does not exactly mimic Empire; it emerges as
a reaction to it, as an aspiration to be purely against it. When we
spoke to adrienne maree brown, she suggested that it is an outgrowth of
terror and violence:
Nick and carla: What sustains it?
brown: The culture that there is only one way to be radical in the
world, one way to create change.
Nick and carla: What provokes or inspires it? What makes it spread?
brown: Terror. We are dying out here. So much destruction is in motion.
I think there is a feeling of urgency, that we need discipline and rigor
to meet this massive threat to our existence—racism, capitalism,
climate, all of it. It feels like we need to be an army.[129]
Empire’s destruction in motion can trigger desires for control and
militarized discipline. It can lead to a monolithic notion of the right
way to be radical, hostile, and suspicious towards other ways of being.
It forces out the messiness of relationships and everyday life in favor
of clear lines between good/bad and radical/reactionary. In this sense,
rigid radicalism imports Empire’s tendencies of fixing, governing,
disciplining, and controlling, while presenting these as a means of
liberation or revolution. In this sense, many radical movements in the
West (and elsewhere) have been entangled in what Spanish intellectual
Amador Fernández-Savater has called the paradigm of government:
In the paradigm of government, being a militant implies always being
angry with what happens, because it is not what should happen; always
chastising others, because they are not aware of what they should be
aware of; always frustrated, because what exists is lacking in this or
that; always anxious, because the real is permanently headed in the
wrong direction and you have to subdue it, direct it, straighten it. All
of this implies not enjoying, never letting yourself be carried away by
the situation, not trusting in the forces of the world.[130]
In the paradigm of government, one always has an idea of what should be
happening, and this gets in the way of being present with what is always
already happening and the capacity to be attuned to the transformative
potentials in one’s own situation. Under the paradigm of government,
people are never committed enough. Silvia Federici spoke to this when we
interviewed her:
This is why I don’t believe in the concept of “self-sacrifice,” where
self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our
desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to
repress ourselves. This has been a common practice in political
movements in the past. But it is one that produces constantly
dissatisfied individuals.[131]
Because rigid radicalism induces a sense of duty and obligation
everywhere, there is a constant sense that one is never doing enough. In
this context, “burnout” in radical spaces is not just about being worn
out by hard work; it is often code for being wounded, depleted, and
frayed: “I’m fucking burning.” What depletes us is not just long hours,
but the tendencies of shame, anxiety, mistrust, competition, and
perfectionism. It is the way in which these tendencies stifle joy: they
prevent the capacity for collective creativity, experimentation, and
transformation. Often, saying one is burnt out is the safest way to
disappear, to take a break, to take care of oneself and get away from
these dynamics.
Rigid radicalism often arises as a reaction to a decline of
transformative and enabling movements. Empire, for its part, responds to
resurgent movements and uprisings by deploying ever more sophisticated
forms of repression and control. Surveillance, criminalization, and
imprisonment are used to destroy people’s capacity to organize. Waves of
austerity and accumulation lead to more debt, higher costs of living,
and economic scarcity. Pacification through the NGO-industrial complex
helps to capture and domesticate movements so that they can be managed
and organizing can be professionalized. This is always at least
partially effective: parts of movements get destroyed, co-opted,
subdued, and divided. In the process, what was once a transformative
practice can become a stagnant ritual, emptied of its power. Sebastian
Touza gives an example from his experience in the student movement in
Argentina:
I think shifts toward joy often happen when people organize to do things
in novel ways because there is a new opportunity to organize or because
the old ways no longer work. I became a member of the student movement
at my university at the end of the last dictatorship in Argentina in
1983. I remember the first years of consolidation of the democratic
institutions as a period in which experimentation was alive. The people
of my generation had no idea what a political party was like (after
eight years of dictatorship during which parties were prohibited).
Militants were willing to revise everything, were open to listen to all
sorts of ideas about how to organize. Today, as a professor, two or
three generations of student militants later, I see the students at the
university where I work too convinced that doing things the way they do
them is the only possible way. All ideas about politics as
experimentation have been lost in the student movement, if we can call a
movement a collection of people who rarely think outside their
respective party lines. Joy has to do with a capacity for new
encounters, to a disposition to new affects and ideas, with desiring
differently, with setting into question the reproduction of things as
they are. Sadness, on the contrary, has to do with fear of leaving the
safety of a routine which let many survive, but very few or nobody at
all to really live and enjoy what they do.[132]
In times of decline there is a tendency for movements to turn inward or
fixate on old strategies or received ways of doing things. Curiosity
calcifies into certainty, closing off the capacity for experimentation
along with its transformative potential.
Rigid radicalism can also take hold through comparing one’s own
situation with other times and places. From a certain perspective, it
can be depressing to hear about places where the social fabric is much
stronger, where there are deep traditions of mutual aid, or where
struggles against Empire are visible, widespread, and intense. It can
activate a feeling that people around us are too flawed, too complacent,
or that our own worlds are lacking something: that they are not
insurrectionary enough, not big enough, not militant enough, not caring
enough. Change can feel out of reach across an unbridgeable chasm. This
can lead to cynicism and pessimism, and a detached certainty that the
here and now is not a place of joy and transformation: revolts might be
widespread elsewhere, but everything is fucked here; people are passive,
and there is no real struggle going on.
Alternatively, the chasm can lead to a desire to cultivate only one’s
own garden, or retreat into little cliques and milieus, where there is a
semblance of safety, security, and predictability: everything around us
is corrupt, but we can live out our beautiful ideals in our own little
world. This is the creation of alternatives in isolation, rather than
through combat that connects to other movements and forms of life.
It can also lead to the endless refinement of a militant ideology that
provides certainty to its adherents, continually reinforced by the
perceived failures of those who do things differently: if they only
understood, in the way that we do, things would be different. These
cynical, escapist, or ideological responses to Empire are completely
understandable. We feel this way often. We have noticed that it happens,
in particular, when we anxiously evaluate our own lives or situations in
relation to others, against a universal standard of radicalness.
But enough! Enough! I can’t endure it any more. Bad air! Bad air! This
workshop where man fabricates ideals—it seems to me it stinks from
nothing but lies.
—Friedrich Nietzsche[133]
One way we see this measuring stick of radicalness materializing is
through the notion of “good politics.” In many places today, it has
become common to say of an individual or group, “they have good
politics.” What does it mean to have good politics? What happens when
politics becomes something a person has, rather than something people do
together, as a shared practice? What happens when shared practices
always have to be announced and their goodness displayed? Increasingly,
we suggest, having good politics means taking the right positions,
saying the right things, circulating the most radical things on Facebook
or Twitter or Tumblr, calling out the right people for being wrong, and
having well-formed opinions. In this sense, having good politics is
similar to “having a good analysis.” When analysis becomes a trait,
rather than a collective and curious process, it stagnates.
We are encouraged—and we often encourage each other—to wear our politics
and analysis like badges, as markers of distinction. When politics
becomes something that one has, like fashion, it always needs to be
visible in order to function. Actions need to be publicized, positions
need to be taken, and our everyday lives need to be spoken loudly to
each other. One is encouraged to make calculations about political
commitments based on how they will be seen, and by whom. Politics
becomes a spectacle to be performed. This reaches its height online,
where sharing the right things and speaking the right words tend to be
the only ways that people can know each other. Groups need to turn
inward and constantly evaluate themselves in relation to these ideals
and then project them outward, proclaiming their intentions, values,
programs, and missions.
But since one can only have good politics in comparison to someone else
that lacks them, rigid radicalism tends towards constant comparison and
measuring. Often the best way to avoid humiliation for lacking good
politics is to find others lacking in militancy, radicalism,
anti-oppression, or some other ideal. One’s politics can never quite
match these perfectionist ideals, so one is subjected to constant shame
and fear.
When radicals attack each other in the game of good politics, it is due
at least in part to the fact that this is a place where people can
exercise some power. Even if one is unable to challenge capitalism and
white supremacy as structures or to participate in transformative
struggles, one can always attack others for being complicit with Empire
and tell oneself that these attacks are radical in and of themselves.
One’s opponents in the game of good politics and rigid radicalism are
not capitalists, nor white supremacists, nor police; they are others
vying for the correct ways of thinking about and fighting capitalism,
white supremacy, and policing. Comparison and evaluation of different
camps or currents can be so constant that it becomes an end in itself:
every encounter with a new current must be approached with a distrustful
search for flaws. We come to know others—their beliefs, their
commitments, their worth—based on how good they are at staking out a
position.
In this sense, rigid radicalism is not one political current, but a
tendency that seeps into many different currents and milieus today. In
some milieus, the currency of good politics is a stated (or
demonstrated) willingness for direct action, riots, property
destruction, and clashes with police. In others, it is the capacity for
anti-oppressive analysis, avoidance of oppressive statements, and the
calling out of those who make them. In others it is the capacity to
avoid work and survive without buying things or paying rent. In some it
is adherence to a vision of leftism or revolution, and in others it is
the conviction that the Left is dead and revolution is a stupid fantasy.
In some it is the capacity to have participated in a lot of projects, or
to be connected to a big network of radical organizers. In every case,
there is a tendency for one milieu to dismiss the commitments and values
of the others and to expose their inadequacies. At its extreme, this
generates a form of sectarianism that is fuelled by the very act of
being vocally sectarian.
The newcomer is immediately placed in a position of debt: owing
dedication, self-sacrifice, and correct analysis that must be
continuously proved. Whether it is the performance of anti-oppressive
language, revolutionary fervor, nihilist detachment, or an implicit
dress code, those who are unfamiliar with the expectations of the milieu
are doomed from the start unless they “catch up” and conform. In subtle
and overt ways, they will be attacked, mocked, and excluded for getting
it wrong, even though these people are often the ones that “good
politics” is supposed to support: those without formal education who
have not been exposed much to radical milieus, but who have a stake in
fighting.
None of this is meant to suggest that we should be more wishy-washy
about oppression, or that hard lines are wrong, or that all radical
practices are corrupt or bad. Developing analysis, naming mistakes, and
engaging in conflict are all indispensable. To undo rigid radicalism is
not a call to “get along” or “shut up and take action” or “be
spontaneous.” People’s capacities to challenge and unlearn oppressive
behaviors, take direct action, or avoid selling labor and paying rent
can create and deepen cracks in Empire. They can all be part of joyful
transformation. But any of these practices can also become measuring
sticks for comparison and evaluation that end up devaluing other
practices and stifling the growth of collective capacities.
When politics circulates in a world dominated by hypervisibility and
rigidity, there is a huge swath of things that do not count, and can
never count: the incredible things that people do when nobody is
looking, the ways that people support and care for each other quietly
and without recognition, the hesitations and stammerings that come
through the encounter with other ways of living and fighting, all the
acts of resistance and sabotage that remain secret, the slow
transformations that take years or decades, and all of the ineffable,
joyful movements and struggles that can never be fully captured in words
or displayed publicly. Rigid radicalism is a barrier to co-learning,
listening, and questioning, and to undoing our subjection (our
sedimented habits). It blocks the difficult recovery and discovery of
responsibility, and the capacity to carve out relationships based in
trust and care. The game of good politics makes it much more difficult
to be humble, responsive, and creative. No one can have any of this.
Joyful common notions can never be possessed; they can only be developed
and sustained collectively. They are shared powers that grow in and
through transformative relationships and struggles. When held up as a
badge of honor or gripped as an identity, they die, detached from the
processes and relationships that animate them.
Rigid radicalism stifles joy: it drains out vital energies by enforcing
external norms and standards, and by feeding insecurities and anxieties.
The greatest tragedy of all is that it does so by converting a lived and
changing radicalism into a stifling ideal, like a horizon that is always
in view, distant and receding.
These tendencies have led many to abandon radical milieus. This is the
narrowing of possibilities induced by rigid radicalism: either continue
in a stifling and depleting atmosphere, or leave and attempt to live the
form of life that is offered up by Empire. For many, this is not a
choice at all because one’s very survival is connected to the same
spaces where rigid radicalism has taken hold. In this sense, rigid
radicalism can be lethal. At the same time, efforts to transform all
this are already underway, and many people are initiating conversations
about undoing some of these tendencies within the milieus they inhabit.
Others are fleeing explicitly radical milieus, creating something new at
the margins of both Empire and visibly radical spaces. By breaking off
with a crew of friends, some have built quieter alternatives and hubs
elsewhere that enable new forms of movement and revive squelched
possibilities. There are many ways of letting in fresh air. Rigid
radicalism is only one tendency among others, even when it is the
dominant one. This is why we have started with—and focused on—joyful
militancy in this book.
How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one
believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our
speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we
ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?
—Michel Foucault[134]
We want to share three stories about some of the origins of rigid
radicalism, along with the ways it is constantly being undone through
people’s capacity for joy and the formulation of common notions. We
focus on three overlapping sources: ideology, morality, and paranoid
reading.
The story of ideology begins in currents of Marxism-Leninism that have
animated movements throughout the twentieth century. But the problem is
broader than Leninist vanguardism—it is ideology as such, and the ways
that ideological thinking nurtures fixed answers, certainties, and
sectarianism. In any movement, ideological rigidity is only one tendency
among others, and it is being challenged by currents that are relatively
non-ideological. Whether explicit or not, non-ideological ways of moving
and relating recover space for experimentation, and they tend to
privilege relationships and feeling over dogmatic principles.
A second story begins with Christian morality and its penchants for
creating sinners and saints and for inducing guilt and fear. Rigid
radicalism is stoked by a moralism that attempts to root out any shred
of complicity with Empire, and in the process it often erases complexity
and animates self-righteousness. At the same time, people are undoing
this in a multiplicity of ways, including through ethical attunement to
their own situations, and by making space for all kinds of responses
that escape the grip of moralism.
Finally, the story of paranoid reading is traced back to schooling and
the way that students are taught to internalize constant evaluation.
Detached from the immediacy of life, measuring everything in relation to
fixed standards, it becomes possible to find inadequacies everywhere.
When these tendencies take over, there is no space for celebration or
surprise. At the same time, we point to some of the ways that this is
being undone, not by abandoning critique, but by recovering
complementary capacities to explore potential and encounter new things.
Either you respect people’s capacities to think for themselves, to
govern themselves, to creatively devise their own best ways to make
decisions, to be accountable, to relate, problem-solve, break-down
isolation and commune in a thousand different ways … OR: you dis-respect
them. You dis-respect ALL of us.
—Ashanti Alston[135]
A major force that has contributed to rigid radicalism is rigid
ideology, and its tendency to generate certainties and fixed answers
that close off the potential for experimentation. Alongside the Marxist
critique of capitalist ideology was an aspiration to replace it with a
revolutionary anti-capitalist ideology. It was thought that revolution
required a unified consciousness among proletarians: they needed to be
taught that it was in their interests to overthrow capitalism. The
revolutionary vanguard was tasked with developing and disseminating this
ideology, and with everything in life subordinated to the goal of
revolution, everyone and everything could be treated instrumentally, as
a means to the seizure of state power and the end of capitalism.
The philosopher Nick Thoburn links this revolutionary anti-capitalist
ideology to what he calls a “militant diagram”: a persistent affective
and ideological tendency that first emerged through Bolshevism and
Leninism.[136] It was later expressed in movements throughout the
twentieth century, from Third World national liberation struggles, to
socialist formations in North America and Europe, to Black Power in the
1960s and ‘70s. According to Colectivo Situaciones, a militant research
group in Argentina, this figure of militancy is always “setting out the
party line,”
keeping for himself a knowledge of what ought to happen in the
situation, which he always approaches from outside, in an instrumental
and transitive way (situations have value as moments of a general
strategy that encompasses them), because his fidelity is, above all,
ideological and preexists all situations.[137]
The notion of a correct party line took different forms among different
movements, but the basic (hierarchical, rigid) structure was the same: a
certain privileged group would help usher in the revolution through a
correct interpretation of theory and the unfolding of history. Despite
joyful transformations and insurrectionary openings, tendencies towards
vanguardism and rigid ideology often led groups towards isolation and
stagnation.
Among many other groups, these tendencies can be seen in the US-based
Weather Underground, a militant white anti-imperialist group active
during the 1970s. They are best-known for their series of bombings
targeting public infrastructure and monuments, conducted in an attempt
to wake up white Americans to realities of US imperialism such as the
government’s slaughter of Vietnamese people and its assassination of
Black Panthers.
They also adopted Maoist self-criticism in order to ferret out any trace
of the dominant ideology within their group. Criticism sessions, which
could last for hours or even days, involved members discussing
weaknesses, tactical mistakes, emotional investments, preparedness for
violence, and even sexual proclivities in an effort to shed all
attachments to the dominant order and induce a revolutionary way of
being.[138] Even the most ruthless criticism could be justified as part
of this process, and the Weather Underground developed a whole regimen
of practices designed to purify themselves of any trace of dominant
ideology, coupled with constant injunctions towards (what they saw as)
the most militant forms of action possible.
While their tactics were controversial, they were also widely supported
at the time, and the Weather Underground was only one of many groups
that were bombing and sabotaging corporate and government
infrastructure. What we are interested in getting at is not particular
tactics, nor something specific to underground groups, but the way that
certain tendencies of thought, action, and feeling can congeal into
stifling patterns. As former Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn
writes,
Weather succumbed to dogma, arrogance, and certainty. We were not alone.
There was recovery, and amends that are still underway. But the
perceived necessity to have answers to everything and to struggle
endlessly resulted in ungenerous and damaging leadership, harm to great
comrades, and wretched behaviour.[139]
As Bill Ayers, another former member, explains, the attempt to escape
completely from a culture of white supremacy and capitalist conformity
enforced an intense, alternative orthodoxy:
It was fanatical obedience, we militant nonconformists suddenly tripping
over one another to be exactly alike, following the sticky roles of
congealed idealism. I cannot reproduce the stifling atmosphere that
overpowered us. Events came together with the gentleness of an impending
train wreck, and there was the sad sensation of waiting for impact.[140]
Though the goal was to create revolutionary forms of organization
capable of overthrowing the US government, their ideological rigidity
and norms of relentless self-sacrifice paradoxically isolated them
further and further from the “masses” that they sought to mobilize.
When we interviewed him, Gustavo Esteva discussed his own experience of
Marxist-Leninist militancy in Latin America during this time:
In the ‘60s, when I became associated with a group in the process of
organizing a guerrilla in Mexico, whose members were assuming that they
were already the vanguard of the proletariat because they had the
revolutionary program, I was fully immersed in what we now call sad
militancy. Our “program” was evidently an intellectual construction in
the Leninist tradition. We had already our criticism of Stalinism, etc.
but we still were in the tradition of trying to seize the power of the
state for a revolution from the top down, through social engineering. We
were thus preparing ourselves (military training, etc) and organizing.
Of course, there were moments or conditions of joy, laughter,
intensified emotion, exhilaration … The environment of conspiracy and
clandestinity and the shared ideology shaped real camaraderie and
episodes full of joy, but it was clear that the experience itself was
pure sad militancy, full of creating boundaries, making distinctions,
comparing, making plans, and so on … How the whole experience ended
makes the point better than any of those stories: one of our leaders
killed the other leader because of a woman. The episode evidenced for us
the kind of violence we were accumulating in ourselves and wanted to
impose on the whole society. In the military training, for an army or a
guerrilla, to learn how to use a weapon is pretty easy; what is
difficult is to learn to kill someone in cold blood, someone like you,
that did nothing personal against you … Nothing sadder than that.[141]
The experience of the Weather Underground and Esteva both make it clear
that these ideological tendencies are not just about ideas; they also
contain their own pleasures and highs, induced in part by the sense of
being clandestine and more aware than “the masses.” Ideology is not
simply rigid and cold: it can include a warm sense of belonging and
camaraderie among its adherents.
This tendency has percolated into contemporary movements and groups,
including those that are not directly influenced by Marxism-Leninism or
Maoism. Nick Thoburn suggests,
It is a central paradox of militancy that as an organization constitutes
itself as a unified body it tends to become closed to the outside, to
the non-militant, those who would be the basis of any mass movement.
Indeed, to the degree that the militant body conceives of itself as
having discovered the correct revolutionary principle and establishes
its centre of activity on adherence to this principle, it has a tendency
to develop hostility to those who fall short of its standard.[142]
As militant rigidity increases, a gap widens between the group and its
outside. But a single, unified Marxism-Leninism has existed only as a
dream. In reality, there has been a proliferation of sectarian
commitments to various ideologies, including strains of Marxism,
anarchism, socialism, and so on. Ideological thinking is not necessarily
something escaped through more and better thinking. For Esteva, one of
the things that fundamentally destabilized the strictures of his
Leninism was his joyful encounter with others, and their confidence in
their own capacities to respond to problems with conviviality:
The joy of living, the passion for fiestas, the capacity to express
emotions, the social climate that I found at the grassroots, in villages
and barrios, in the midst of extreme misery, began to change my
attitudes. My participation in different kinds of peasant and urban
marginal movements gave me a radically different approach. The break
point was perhaps the explosion of autonomy and self-organization after
the earthquake in Mexico City in 1985. It became for me a life-changing
experience. The victims of the earthquake were suffering all kinds of
hardships. They had lost friends and relatives, their homes, their
possessions, almost everything. Their convivial reconstruction of their
lives and culture would not have been possible without the amazing
passion for living they showed at every moment. Such passion had very
powerful political expressions and was the seed for amazing social
movements. In the following years the balance of forces changed in
Mexico City, already a monstrous settlement of fifteen million people.
There was a radical contrast between the guerrilla and these movements.
The very notion of militancy changed in me: it was no longer associated
with an organization, a party, an ideology, and even less a war … It was
an act of love.[143]
To experience joy in this way is not simply to feel good, but to be
transformed. Esteva’s experience with the grassroots led him to center
conviviality and joy in his work and his life while continuing to be
involved with and support militant movements, including the Zapatistas
and the insurrectionary uprisings in Oaxaca.
For us, this shows that militancy is always about more than tactics or
combativeness; it is tied to questions of affect: how movements enable
people to grow their own capacities and become new people (or don’t).
Marina Sitrin consistently foregrounds affect in her own work with
horizontalist movements in Argentina, and when we interviewed her for
this book, she talked about her experience with the different affective
spaces created by groups she has been involved with:
On a basic level, the space a group or movement creates from the
beginning is key—the tone and openness, or not, makes a big difference
if one wants to focus on new relationships with one another. Along these
same lines, ideological rigidity and hierarchies in ideas, formal and
informal, create a closed and eventually nasty space for those not
ascribing to the ideology or a part of the clique. People do not stay in
movements that organize in this way, or if they do it is with a sort of
obedience that is not transformative and instead creates versions of the
same power and hierarchy …
My early organizing experiences were fortunately with anti-racist and
later Central American Solidarity movements, with people who had been a
part of the civil rights and later anti-nuclear movements, so who had a
focus at least in part on social relationships and democracy. Later
however, when I decided I needed to be a part of a revolutionary group
that was organizing against capitalism as a whole, well, I found myself
in a few different centrist socialist groups which were really
soul-deadening. It was all about ideology and guilt. One could never do
enough, and could never know enough or quote enough of whomever was the
revolutionary of the day (James Cannon, Tony Cliff, etc). It was also
politically all about the end and not the day to day, that even included
women, which one would think, after the radical feminist movement,
[that] these groups would get that relationships have to change now; but
no, it was all about the future free society we all had to work
for—accepting relationships as they are, pretty much.
I later came around some anarchist groups, thinking that they would be
more open and focused on the day to day, as that is what I had read from
the theory, but found the rigidity around identity too harsh and since I
was not squatting or dressing a certain way I was kept at arm’s
length—which was fine since I felt too rejected to try very hard.[144]
Sitrin’s account makes it clear that rigid radicalism does not stem from
one ideology or group in particular. Marxism-Leninism has lost its grip
on many movements, and accounts of such groups can sound strange and
distant today. In North America at least, the dream of a revolutionary
seizure of state power has lost a lot of its force, but in many cases
Marxist ideology has been superseded by other ideological closures and
sectarian tendencies. Currents of anarchism can be just as hostile and
ideologically rigid.
Anarchism is a vibrant and complex tradition. At their most joyful,
anarchist currents support common notions such as mutual aid, autonomy,
direct action, and solidarity while refusing ideological closures. At
the same time however, anarchists have always grappled with ideology.
The early twentieth-century anarchist feminist Emma Goldman shared this
experience in her autobiography:
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a
cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a
grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade,
he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance.
Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for
one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My
frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to
mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown
into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful
ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and
prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our
Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should
not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I
want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to
beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live
it in spite of the whole world--prisons, persecution, everything. Yes,
even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my
beautiful ideal.[145]
Since Goldman wrote about this a century ago, this kind of policing has
continued, but in new and different ways. While Maoism and Leninism were
ascendant in radical politics, it took the form of maintaining an
explicit party line. With the decline of these ideologies, rigid
radicalism has shape-shifted into new forms. One of the ideological
tendencies animating anarchist and anti-authoritarian spaces is what
amory starr calls “grumpywarriorcool.” Rather than the militant
conformity of Marxist-Leninism, grumpywarriorcool manifests as an
ideology of individualistic anti-conformity and anti-vanguardism. starr
gives a polemical example of the “manarchist” whose “freedom” to do
whatever he wants ends up reinforcing individualism, whiteness, and
patriarchy:
“i’m going to stink, i’m going in there even though i’m contagious, i’m
going to bring my barking dog, i have the right to do whatever the fuck
i want and people just have to deal with it and i’m going to call this
“cultural diversity” … meanwhile other folks around are feeling like
another white guy is doing whatever the fuck he wants.[146]
She suggests that privileging individual freedom is ideological because
it tends to force out potentials for connection, curiosity, and a sense
of collective responsibility. In starr’s analysis, there are some
continuities between grumpywarriorcool and earlier ideological forms;
norms of fearlessness, self-sacrifice, and bravery, she argues, can end
up eliminating space to express hesitation or fear. These intimate
reflections can be transformative, but they remain hidden because it is
too difficult to voice them in a climate where fearlessness is the
ideal. Similarly, starr names “smart radicalism” as a fundamental
premise of white, anti-authoritarian organizing of grumpywarriorcool: a
commitment to radical principles and theories, a “correct”
interpretation of them, and the assumption that this correctness will
avoid mistakes. Forced out by these tendencies are friendliness,
comfort, generosity, and curiosity.[147] Outsiders are viewed with cool
suspicion.
These stories are not meant as a criticism of anarchism (or Marxism) as
a whole; we are trying to locate ideological tendencies within these
complex and varied traditions. At its best, anarchism has enabled the
refusal of fixed ideologies in favor of experimentation, openness,
autonomy, and a proliferation of different struggles and forms of life.
As scott crow writes,
An abundance of literature has been written about anarchism over the
last hundred years. How is it organized? What could it look like? What
are examples of it in practice? There are also complex critiques and
analyses of it, but, for me, anarchism is just a point of reference, a
descriptive word to get one’s bearings for starting conversations that
move to action. It describes an opening up of possibilities for changing
ourselves and our communities. It describes a set of guiding principles
and ideas, serious and playful at once, not a rigid ideology.[148]
We think this conception of anarchism—as a point of reference and an
evolving set of questions—can help ward off the crystallization of fixed
ideology. crow further suggests that anarchism is animated by a trust in
people’s ability to solve their own problems and take collective
responsibility, rather than a prescription for how they should do it.
This is the kind of anarchism we are after: a non-ideological
sensibility that nurtures trust in people’s capacity to care for each
other and to be responsive, inventive, and militant.
In this sense, Ashanti Alston suggests that the problem is not about
displacing Marxism-Leninism or Maoism with an anarchist ideology; the
problem is ideology as such, and all the baggage that comes with it:
Ideology … comes out of having a set of answers for something. So even
for me with my anarchism, I don’t think it’s classical. I don’t call
myself an anarcho-communist or none of the others. There’s definitely
anarchism that’s open to being in tune with always-changing realities.
For me, anarcho-communists got good points about certain things,
primitivists have good points about certain things. Them two don’t get
along, but I get something from both of them. I like some aspects of
anarcho-individualism, and Tolstoy’s spiritualism. For most of my folks,
my people are Christians or Muslims and increasingly Yoruba, Kemetic,
and other African religions that they’re recovering and using. I don’t
want to be categorized as a particular school because I know if I do,
the world I would hope to be created won’t have room for all kinds of
tendencies of anarchism, or all kinds of tendencies of people living
their lives according to their own terms.[149]
From this perspective, ideology is a screen that limits the possibility
of open-ended encounters where mutual learning and transformation can
take place. Its inducement of conformity tends towards closed, stagnant
little enclaves. Ideological and sectarian tendencies offer the comfort
of being able to pin things down, the pleasure of feeling that one is
above or ahead of others, and the somber ability to sort new encounters
into neat categories so that one is never too unsettled or affected by
anything.
Rather than becoming rooted in a single ideological current, Alston
points to the potential of affirming the most enabling parts of a
multiplicity of currents. Similarly, when we interviewed Richard Day, he
made a distinction between an ideological approach and an ethical one,
like Alston’s:
Day: If someone is working ideologically, they will have a pat answer to
any question that might be asked, without having to do much in the way
of thinking or analysis. If you ask a liberal about smashing bank
windows in a protest, they will probably say it’s violent and bad; if
you ask an anarchist, they will probably say it’s not violence, it’s
destruction of stolen property and quite a valid thing to do. This is
similar to working morally, in that you need only consult a tablet, ask
a functionary such as a priest, and they will tell you what to do and
not do.
In a critical, analytic—ethical—way of relating, it is impossible to
know what one might think or feel ahead of time; that will be contingent
upon many circumstances of the situation. There is likely to be much
more complexity, much more nuance, less dogmatism, certainty, and
purity.
In general, I think it’s safe to associate ideological ways of relating
with rigid radicalism, and that’s why you find that so many people, all
over the world, who are actually involved in the most powerful social
movements and upheavals, tend to steer away from ideology, and orient
more to shared values, practices, and goals.
Nick & carla: And not being ideological means being uncertain, as well,
right?
Day: Yeah. Working non-ideologically definitely involves an element of
openness, a vulnerability, not only at the level of emotion, but also at
the level of thought, and of political relationships. There is a certain
sort of safety in having an answer for everything.[150]
As we insisted earlier, ethics here does not mean an individualized set
of fixed principles (as in consumer ethics, or personal ethics) but
instead a capacity to be attuned to the situation, to be immersed in it,
and to create something emergent out of the existing conditions. Alston
speaks to the power and potential of working across difference in ways
that respect where people are coming from:
Different consciousnesses can come from different places … and we can
figure out the dialog, how to create a way forward that respects us all,
that respects the different worlds that we come from. So for me, if that
had happened back then in 1970, where would we have been right now? And
for me, that’s such a better way to go, ‘cause for the queer community,
or the Yoruba community that may exist in Brooklyn, what’s best for
them? Whether one is a small geographical community or tied to their
ethnicity or dealing with a lifestyle, we should just be open to come
together and see how we can do this in a different kind of way. That’s
the challenge.[151]
This is the ethics of encounter. Instead of asking whether we (or they)
are inherently radical, revolutionary, or anarchist, an ethical approach
asks questions about how we affect each other, what new encounters
become possible, and what we can do together. None of the answers to
these questions can be known in advance. They can only be asked as part
of an open-ended, unfolding experiment, as markers in an always-changing
world, in which we figure things out along the way. As the anarchist
collective Crimethinc writes,
If the hallmark of ideology is that it begins from an answer or a
conceptual framework and attempts to work backward from there, then one
way to resist ideology is to start from questions rather than answers.
That is to say—when we intervene in social conflicts, doing so in order
to assert questions rather than conclusions.
What is it that brings together and defines a movement, if not
questions? Answers can alienate or stupefy, but questions seduce. Once
enamored of a question, people will fight their whole lives to answer
it. Questions precede answers and outlast them: every answer only
perpetuates the question that begot it.[152]
We would add that an important complement to asking questions is being
able to listen sincerely to responses, and to those with altogether
different questions. The power of questions comes from people being able
to respond and hear each other in new ways. It comes from hanging onto
the uncertainties they generate, and the new potential that comes along
with them. To undo ideology is not as straightforward as taking off a
pair of glasses to see the world differently. To ward off ideology is
not finally to see clearly, but to be disoriented, allowing things to
emerge in their murkiness and complexity. It might mean seeing and
feeling more, but often vaguely, like flickers in one’s peripheral
vision, or strange sensations that defy familiar categories and
emotions. It is an undoing of oneself, cutting across the grain of
habits and attachments. To step out of an inherited ideology can be
joyful and painful.
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive
feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out
under the guise of virtue.
—Erich Fromm[153]
There is a second story, related and overlapping, but distinct: rigid
radicalism can be traced to a Christian current of moralism, with its
penchants for fear and hostility to a sinful world. Even within
Christianity, this was not the only current; it has always also been a
site of transformation and revolt.[154] But the dominant form of
Christianity over centuries in Europe was a colonizing force, seeking to
crush its own rebellious currents within and to convert or annihilate
the rest of the world. To be successful, the Church did not merely
command obedience. Through practices like confession, it taught its
subjects to internalize their own sinfulness, guilt, and inadequacy.
This Christian subjectivity is one based in resentment of excess and
transformation, bent on spreading guilt and shame. Inspired in part by
his reading of Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche showed how Christian
morality sacralized meekness and submission, turning powerlessness into
a mark of blessedness.[155] His concept of ressentiment names the
nurturance of a deep-seated hatred and fear of otherness, and of one’s
own sinful desires, based in a stultifying morality.
Over the last several centuries guilt and shame have undergone a secular
conversion, rejecting the Church for its superstition, while embracing
ressentiment. This secular subject hates the Church, but loves its
poison.[156] The affective structures of lack, guilt, fear, and purism
remains intact.
Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what
you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you
didn’t know what you know today.
—Malcolm X[157]
Liberal morality seeps into movements in the form of incessant
regulation and pacification of struggles. It replaces the transformative
power of dignity with moral indignation and its tendencies of shame and
self-righteousness. It pathologizes anger, hatred, and destruction,
turning non-violence into a moral imperative rather than a tactic. This
is the morality of the cop who tells you to calm down with one hand on
his gun; the sympathizer whose “support” for you evaporates as soon as
things become “violent”; the citizen who says you had better vote or you
can’t complain. People in struggle are constantly told about the
“correct” way of conducting themselves if they want to be respected and
heard. The liberal morality of whiteness converts racism and sexism into
matters of individual prejudice. Conversations about violence and
oppression are constantly derailed by individual emotions and the
erasure of power relations where white feelings matter more than Black
lives.
Under the stifling weight of liberal morality, anti-liberal morality has
grown in reaction. The targets and the enemies change, but the structure
remains, and radical morality can reach new heights of corrosive
self-righteousness and punishment. From this perspective, things are
always in danger of becoming infected or diluted by liberalism. Liberal
or oppressive sentiments must be attacked wherever they are detected.
Call-outs and radical take-downs proliferate. Indignation grows:
everything is corrupt and tainted; nothing is as it should be. This “as
it should be” is no longer determined by Christian priests, or
politicians and good citizens, but by a radical certainty that one is on
the right side of a moral drama between good and evil.
Like the old Christian morality, new forms of moralism subsist on the
evils they decry: to remain pious, the priest must reveal new sins. This
can surface as an incessant search for oppression and a ceaseless attack
on anyone who is found guilty, including oneself, through new forms of
confession, trials, and punishments. The new Other is the
not-radical-enough, the liberal, the perpetrator, the oppressor.
A number of our interlocutors have pointed out how these moralistic
tendencies toward punishment can end up excluding many of those who are
supposed to be centered by anti-oppressive practices: poor people,
people without formal education, and others who haven’t been exposed to
the ever evolving language of radical communities. In a compassionate
way, Kelsey Cham C. shares their experience with call-out culture and
language policing upon being introduced to radical communities:
When I came out as queer in Montreal … I started to find accurate words
to describe how I felt about the world. Even though this skill was my
entry into more political communities, I still felt incredibly judged.
It was like an ultra-heightened experience of not being allowed in the
cool-kid club in high school -- but with all new rules that I had not
learned and that no one took the time to explain to me. The language I
grew up with could no longer be applied and would sometimes get me
kicked out of social settings. My entire experience of growing up was
judged and I felt totally isolated in trying to figure out why.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve figured out the “right way” to navigate in
these communities by learning language protocol and radical terminology
while dropping the offensive and oppressive slang. I don’t disagree with
changing language to support systems we care about. I do disagree with
judging people for not knowing the rules—especially since radicals are
often organizing in favor of marginalized communities who are generally
not aware of these rules.
If I wanted to fill out a form to describe my identity, I could check a
bunch of boxes that would make my experience worth standing up for:
Queer. Trans. Person of Color. Former Sex Trade Worker. Ironically, the
biggest advocates for people like me—the people ready to throw down
stats about harm reduction and youth, gender queer folks, and the
vulnerable people in society—many of them had no patience for me. I came
into their communities looking for support, friends, and direction. I
came having left abusive and sexually manipulative partners. I came in
hella lost, unaware, and not very educated. But I came in agreement with
their political perspectives, because I knew society was fucked from the
time I was twelve—maybe even younger. In high school, while other kids
wrote about teen heartbreak, I wrote about injustices I saw everywhere.
I came into these radical communities wanting to make change, but all my
habits and the language I had learned to protect myself with got me in
shit.[158]
Cham C.’s story gets at a common experience in radical milieus, in which
language and conduct are intensely scrutinized, and those who fail are
often forced out. Far from arbitrary, these rules are often earnest
attempts to root out oppressive behaviors, with the aspiration of
creating spaces where everyday habits and language are less laden with
structural violence. In a world where white supremacy, homophobia,
transphobia, misogyny, and other forms of violence are incessant, the
desire to create spaces that feel a little safer makes a lot of sense.
Yet as Cham C. explains, they can become stifling and exclusionary in
the enforcement of a “right” way of being.
What reinforces rigid radicalism, we think, is not the attempt to change
language or behavior, but the way these attempts can be subsumed by
moralism and reinforce shame, blame, punishment, and guilt. Morality is
dangerous not only because it can reinforce oppression, but because it
can divorce people from their own power. People are reduced to their
statements, becoming symptoms or examples of violence, rather than
complex and changing beings. Moral indignation can promote stagnation,
encouraging complaints and condemnations that lead nowhere. The desire
to be morally right can get in the way of here-and-now transformation.
Squeezed out by morality, we think, are common notions: ethical,
responsive ways of relating that are tuned to the complexities of each
situation and capable of supporting collective transformation. When
morality takes over, common notions are converted into rigid principles,
or practices that can no longer be questioned. This can be seen in what
has become known as “call-out culture” in many radical milieus: the
prevalence of publicly attacking certain statements or behaviors as
oppressive. As Toronto-based writer Asam Ahmad writes,
What makes call-out culture so toxic is not necessarily its frequency so
much as the nature and performance of the call-out itself. Especially in
online venues like Twitter and Facebook, calling someone out isn’t just
a private interaction between two individuals: it’s a public performance
where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are.
Indeed, sometimes it can feel like the performance itself is more
significant than the content of the call-out.
Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex
teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of
individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated
stories and histories.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian
undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive
communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out. More
often than not, this boundary is constructed through the use of
appropriate language and terminology – a language and terminology that
are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with. In such a
context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time.[159]
Through its toxic performance, call-out culture can activate and
intensify a climate of fear, shame, and self-righteousness. It is
important to note that none of the voices we are bringing into this
chapter are suggesting that calling people out, naming oppression, or
creating boundaries is wrong. Because oppression is so pervasive and
people’s responses to it are so heavily policed and pathologized, these
can be hard conversations to have. We want to suggest that this
conversation is already being had in ways that are more open,
transformative, and ethical than what morality allows for. Ethical
attunement disrupts universalizing moral frameworks that would dictate
how people deal with oppression. It enables exploration, collective
questioning, and responsiveness that is tuned to the situation at hand.
In a widely circulated article entitled “Calling IN: A Less Disposable
Way of Holding Each Other Accountable,” Ngọc Loan Trần explains how
calling out can feed into destructive ways of relating:
Most of us know the drill. Someone says something that supports the
oppression of another community, the red flags pop up and someone swoops
in to call them out.
But what happens when that someone is a person we know — and love? What
happens when we ourselves are that someone?
And what does it mean for our work to rely on how we have been
programmed to punish people for their mistakes?
I’ll be the first person and the last person to say that anger is valid.
Mistakes are mistakes; they deepen the wounds we carry. I know that for
me when these mistakes are committed by people who I am in community
with, it hurts even more. But these are people I care deeply about and
want to see on the other side of the hurt, pain, and trauma: I am
willing to offer compassion and patience as a way to build the road we
are taking but have never seen before.[160]
Whereas morality tends toward universal answers, certainties, and binary
thinking, Trần recovers space for openness and uncertainty in the
concept of “calling in,” pointing to the ways that people are supporting
each other in naming harm and violence, and undoing it together. Trần
goes on to say that calling in is not about being soft or nice, but
instead about tuning in to the complexities and relationships of each
situation when dealing with harm and mistakes:
I don’t propose practicing “calling in” in opposition to calling out. I
don’t think that our work has room for binary thinking and action.
However, I do think that it’s possible to have multiple tools,
strategies, and methods existing simultaneously. It’s about being
strategic, weighing the stakes and figuring out what we’re trying to
build and how we are going to do it together.[161]
In this sense, calling in can be understood as a common notion: not a
fixed way of being or even a recommendation, but a practice that can be
developed collectively, with transformative effects, and shared with
caution. It is resonant with other common notions that have developed
elsewhere, such as “leaning in” and “meeting people where they’re at.”
It is an invitation to tune into the specificities and relationships in
each situation, rather than falling back on the prescriptions and
justifications of morality.
Ethical attunement might include firm boundaries and aggressive
call-outs. It might include attunement to one’s own exhaustion,
resulting in a refusal to engage at all. We find that ethical attunement
thrives most as a collective process of experimentation. Like the
concepts of infinite responsibility and emergent trust, it is sustained
through a willingness to make mistakes and to allow others to make them,
rather than trying to avoid being wrong. It’s ultimately about the
shared capacity to take care of each other in the face of pain, hurt,
and violence.
There is always the risk of a concept like calling in being recaptured
by liberal morality, adding a new set of norms to govern the conduct of
people who are already dealing with systemic oppression: be nice, take
care of people, don’t get so angry. Therefore we want to be unequivocal,
especially as white people, that we are not trying to establish new
norms of conduct for conversations about oppression, or to suggest that
call-outs are wrong or counterproductive. Morality can prop up white
fragility, white guilt, savior complexes, and other moves to innocence.
It can enforce the idea that there is some duty to have these
conversations over and over, extracting emotional labor from colonized
people or people of color as if it were an obligation. Liberal morality
can hide the white supremacist violence pervading schools, policing, and
the prison industrial complex, reducing racism to questions of
individual guilt and inducing defensive reactions from white people:
it’s not my fault, I’m not racist, I haven’t done anything wrong.
Morality can sometimes also be behind tendencies to replace innocence
with sin, enabling white anti-racism that creates barriers to undoing
white supremacy. As white people, moralism can induce us to loudly
proclaim our knowledge that we are racist, and to self-righteously call
out racism in others. Anti-racist organizer Chris Crass, among others,
have argued that there is a class dimension to this:
For anti-racist work with a middle class orientation, this then often
looks like an over-emphasis on changing personal behavior, using correct
language, and calling out other people who aren’t acting and speaking in
the right way. It can lead to a looking down on the communities that you
have come from and distancing yourself from your own past by ruthlessly
criticizing everyone who acts and talks like you did two weeks ago.[162]
Crass goes on to link these middle-class tendencies to perfectionism and
a fear of making mistakes. At the same time, he makes it clear that this
is not an attack on the people reproducing these tendencies, but on
Empire’s forms of subjection:
The enemy is capitalism, not middle class activists. And a middle class
orientation isn’t something that only middle class people can have, it’s
the orientation that all of us who aren’t ruling class are raised to
endlessly and exhaustingly strive for.[163]
Feminism, disability justice, decolonization, Black liberation, and
other interconnected currents are short-circuiting individualizing
moralism with much more complex stories about oppression. Stories about
institutionalized white supremacy do not blame individual white people,
but they do not let us off the hook, either: they reveal the ways that
we are participating in a system that stretches far beyond us, and they
compel us to discover ways to disrupt that system by supporting
anti-racist struggles. They attune us to relationships and histories and
deepen response-ability, not the the prescription of fixed duties, but
by growing capacities to be responsive to a whole range of collectively
formulated problems.
Common notions are emerging all the time against the grain of moralism.
These conversations are already happening in ways that get beyond
dichotomies of rightness and wrongness towards more complex questions.
This can be seen when people are able to draw out other ways of being
with each other, activating collective responses to violence. It can be
seen in disruptive tactics of direct action, and in the quiet forms of
healing and being present with others. It can be seen in the strategic
use of privilege, and in the ways that people plant seeds and trust
others to reach their own conclusions.
Transformative responses like these are joyful in the Spinozan sense;
they lead not to an increase in happiness, but to an increase in one’s
capacity to affect and be affected, with all the pain and risk and
uncertainty this might entail. Joy is never a duty, and never something
imposed on other people. We are not saying people should be ethically
attuned. We are trying to affirm that joyful transformation is already
happening, as an emergent power that undoes moralism and opens up new
potentials, sometimes even beautifully. Joy subsists through common
notions, which need to be held and tended in order to remain alive. As
Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Lathe of Heaven, “Love doesn’t just sit
there, like a stone. It has to be made, like bread; remade all the time,
made new.”[164]
section title is borrowed from Eve Sedgwick, from whom we’ve also taken
the concept of paranoid reading. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid
Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably
Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), 124–51.
What follows is a third story about the origins of rigid radicalism,
guided by these questions: What makes it possible, or even predictable,
for radical spaces and movements to be perceived in terms of their
shortcomings? What encourages the suspicion and incessant critique that
runs through so many radical milieus? Is there something that makes
critique a reflex and a habit, and forces out other possibilities?
One example is learning to walk: when little kids take their first
steps, people around them cheer, rejoice, and celebrate. We take photos,
tell friends, and record these moments because we want to share the joy
in witnessing the emergence of a new increase in capacity: this kid is
learning to walk! But if we take a perfectionist perspective, then why
celebrate? The kid won’t usually walk for very long; they stumble and
fall, and they certainly can’t run. But no one says “Why are you
celebrating? They’re not really walking yet!”
If the kid learning to walk is just another kid walking, it’s no longer
something worth celebrating. Those who celebrate it are naïve, or
getting a bit carried away: kids are learning to walk all the time. But
in the moment, it doesn’t seem naïve, because we are part of the process
of witnessing this kid walk, in this way, for the very first time.
We bring up this example because it seems obvious that it is nonsensical
to impose external ideals of walking on little kids who are just
learning, or to approach the situation with a detached and suspicious
stance. It seems obvious (we hope) that a toddler’s increase in
capacity—those first steps that mark the emergence of something new—is
sufficient in itself. It is a joyful moment, worth celebrating, not
because it’s part of some linear process of development, but because
it’s an emergent power for that kid, palpable to all present in those
moments.
With this in mind, why is it so difficult, sometimes, to celebrate small
victories or humble increases in collective power and capacity? What
makes it so easy to dismiss transformation as too limited? What makes it
so easy to find joy lacking? We see variants of this dynamic happen a
lot: someone celebrates something joyful, while others offer up
reminders of its insufficiency. We find ourselves doing the same thing,
sometimes. What allows for the constant imposition of external norms,
criteria, and ideals for evaluation?
Surely it comes from many different places, but we think part of it can
be traced to the ways schooling crushes openness to new encounters. Most
of us have been exposed to at least some of this for big chunks of our
lives: schooling replaces curiosity with instruction, memorization, and
hierarchical evaluation. We are encouraged to internalize the notion
that our worth is connected to our grades, that we are locked in
competition with our classmates, and that we are like empty vessels
awaiting knowledge.
Not long after children learn to walk, they are often stuck in schools
and subjected to constant monitoring, control, and evaluation. In
school, new capacities can only be affirmed when they conform to the
criteria set out by the institution; that is, when a student has learned
a particular thing, at the right time, in the right way. Curiosity and
the discovery of emergent connections need to be crushed in order to
create this conformity, and those who refuse or resist are quickly
labeled “problem” children, in need of remedial education, medication,
therapy, or punishment.
Those who make it through learn to internalize incessant evaluation by
externally imposed standards. By reducing lives to these external
standards, schooling crushes the capacity for joy. Adults, parents, and
other caregivers are tasked with continuing this process outside of
school, teaching children to categorize and measure everything,
including themselves. There is always someone further along, who has
done it better and more proficiently. Evaluation works by removing the
immediacy of life where we can sense the unfurling of newness and
potential and learn by exploring the world, following our curiosities.
This tendency for constant evaluation and the imposition of external
standards has percolated its way into many facets of life under Empire.
It exists even among radicals: what changes is merely the kind of
standards and the mode of evaluation. Is it radical? Is it anarchist? Is
it critical? Is it revolutionary? Is it anti-oppressive? How might it be
co-opted, complicit, or flawed? What is problematic? What does it fail
to do? How limited, ineffective, and short-lived is it? Margaret Killjoy
spoke to us about the ways that these tendencies can pervade anarchist
spaces:
While I think there’s a decent bit of spontaneity and not-making-rules
and such going on in radicalism, I see an awful lot less creativity at
the moment. Particularly, I see very little creativity from tactical,
strategic, and even theoretical analysis … For a bunch of anarchists,
we’re remarkably uncomfortable with new ideas. If I were to hazard a
guess, I would say that happens because we’ve really honed our ability
to critique things but not our ability to embrace things.[165]
Applied incessantly, critique can become a reflex that forces out other
capacities. The queer theorist Eve Sedgwick argues that this penchant
for constant critique runs through many currents of radical thought, in
what she calls paranoid reading.[166] Paranoid reading is based on a
stance of suspicion: an attempt to avoid co-optation or mistakes through
constant vigilance. It seeks to ward off bad surprises by ensuring that
oppression and violence are already known, or at least anticipated, so
that one will not be caught off guard, and so that one can react to the
first sign of trouble. The result is that one is always on guard and
never surprised. By approaching everything with detached suspicion, one
closes off the capacity to be affected in new ways.
When we interviewed Richard Day, he suggested that this tendency is
linked to being in pain and converting that pain into an incessant
search for lack:
In general, I think rigid radicalism is a response to feeling really
hurt and fucked up. And the real enemy is the dominant order, but it
gets mixed into this big soup, so the enemy becomes each other. It
becomes oneself. It’s a finding lacking as such … a finding lacking
almost everywhere with almost everyone. And when that lack is found,
then of course there needs to be some action: which is going to be to
tell, or force, or coerce, or get at that lack, and try to turn it into
a wholeness. So strangely enough I’d suggest that rigid radicalism is
driven by a desire to heal. And it has exactly the opposite effect: of
sundering the self more, of sundering communities more, and so on.[167]
Those of us who regularly find ourselves in pain might find this paradox
familiar. Through the constant imposition of external standards,
everything can be found lacking, and all kinds of coercive responses can
seem justified. An endless cycle ensues: no one and nothing is good
enough, and this paranoid stance constantly incapacitates exploration,
healing, and affirmation.
Many of us learn this mode of thought through university, or through
immersion in radical spaces themselves: we learn to search for,
anticipate, and point out the pervasiveness of Empire. Even without the
sad rigor of the Weather Underground, we learn to search the bodies,
behaviors, and words of others for any shred of complicity. Mik Turje
spoke to this tendency when we interviewed them:
I think as a youth I was really idealistic, and I came to the university
context, and critical theory, where idealism and imagining something
better was stamped out as something naïve. The only option was to master
the hypercritical language myself, and one-upping people. I got really
good at that. I won all of the political arguments in school, but … I
was being a shitbag of a militant, tearing everyone down.[168]
By being immersed in paranoid reading, people learn to find themselves
and others lacking. Having been “educated,” one becomes a pedagogue
oneself, spreading the word about Empire, oppression, and violence, and
in the process one tends to position others as naïve and ignorant.
This is clear in how surprise and curiosity are often infantilized by
Empire. They are treated as foolish or “childish”—that is, lacking the
educated, rational, civilized, adult capacities of detached evaluation.
Paranoid reading and its association with adulthood and rational
detachment are transmitted through schooling, founded on patriarchal
white supremacy. Based on suspicion, perfectionism, and the penchant for
finding flaws in ourselves and others, paranoid reading prevents us from
being joyfully in touch with the world and with the always already
present potential for transformation.
Crucially, paranoid reading and lack-finding have their own affective
ecology, with their own pleasures and rewards. There can be a sense of
satisfaction in being the one who anticipates or exposes inadequacy.
There can be safety and comfort in a paranoid stance, because it helps
ensure that we already know what to do with new encounters. Incessantly
exposing flaws can be pleasurable, and can even become a source of
belonging.
We think this is at the heart of what destroys the transformative
potential of movements from within: the capacity for paranoid reading
closes off the capacity to embrace and be embraced by new things. The
stance of detached judgment means remaining at a distance from what is
taking place. In contrast, experimentation requires openness and
vulnerability, including the risk of being caught off guard or hurt.
From a paranoid perspective, things like gratitude, celebration,
curiosity, and openness are naïve at best, and potentially dangerous.
When everything is anticipated, or one can see immediately how something
is imperfect or lacking, one misses the capacity to be affected and
moved.
Beyond mere happiness, what is being crushed by paranoid reading and
lack-finding is all the ambivalence and messy intensity of
transformation. Walidah Imarisha evokes this powerfully in her book,
Angels With Dirty Faces, in which she shares the moment when she and
other prison abolition organizers learned that Haramia, one of their
imprisoned comrades, has had his death sentence commuted after a long
struggle:
“The governor commuted his sentence!” Haramia’s campaign organizer
smiled brighter than the sun beating down on us.
“It’s the first time Perry ever did it! The Board of Pardons voted 6-1
for clemency – they haven’t voted to stop an execution in 25 years. We
did it! We won!”
Silence. Incredulousness. Too scared to believe, to hope.
Then the explosion – yelling, hugging, crying […]
They commuted Haramia’s sentence to life in prison. On an LA radio
interview, I spoke of this victory. A woman called in: “But he’s still
in prison, for life. Isn’t that a death sentence too? How can you call
this a win?”
I paused. “We won a battle in the larger war. We know that tomorrow we
have to get up to continue. Tonight we celebrate. We celebrate that
tomorrow, Haramia will see another dawn. Today … today was a good day.”
We took over the prison yard, the supporters. Sprawled out on the grass.
Screamed the good news into cell phones. Fell into each other’s arms,
laughing. Unable to give words to my feelings, I somersaulted across the
prison lawn. It was the first time I ever felt truly joyous in a prison
yard, without a sense of dread and sadness nestled underneath.
It was the only time I saw guards do absolutely nothing as we broke
every prison conduct rule, written and unwritten. They knew we won that
day.
I couldn’t help but feel Hasan’s* presence. Smiling his child-like grin.
Whispering softly, “Yeah, Wa Wa, enjoy it now.
“Tomorrow we got a lot more work to do.”[169]
Imarisha’s story evokes the intensity of this moment, palpable even to
the prison guards: it was enough to disrupt, if only for a few moments,
the brutal and arbitrary rules of the prison. The event punched a hole
in the ultra-controlled space of the prison.
Imarisha makes clear the importance of celebration, even as the
ambivalence of the victory was obvious. Only from a perspective of
comparative evaluation and paranoid reading is it possible to remind
oneself and others that the key point to focus on is that Haramia is
still in prison, or that the prison industrial complex is still intact.
Only when viewed from a distance, without the investments and
connections of those involved, could one think that this celebration is
naïve or unfounded. Imarisha spoke to this when we interviewed her:
In a society that fits everything into dichotomy, you win or you lose.
There is no space for a win that is attached to a loss. In the case of
Haramia KiNassor, whose death sentence was commuted, it was an immense
win to have that brotha still with us. And other people were executed
that same week by the state of Texas. And his comrade Hasan Shakur who
was also my close compañer@ was executed almost a year before to the
day. So for me the win and loss of the situation was ever present,
breathing together. And it’s really hard to hold both of those.[170]
Imarisha’s words reveal the capacity to hold on to intensity and
ambivalence, without parsing it into a binary between “feeling good” and
“feeling bad,” or setting optimism against pessimism. To be capable of
holding all of this—of wins attached to losses, and joys attached to
sorrows—is fundamentally about being affected. It is about inhabiting a
world of uncertainty and complexity, about feeling and participating in
emergent and collective powers. Joy.
What all of this makes clear to us is that there is no formula for a
break with paranoid reading: there is only the discovery and renewal of
ways of moving and relating, right where we are, in our own lives. To
undo paranoid reading entails more than “being nice” or “not alienating
people.” It can be about openness to new encounters and putting
relationships before ideas. It requires challenging the corrosive
tendency that impels us to find lack everywhere, to outmeasure, to
out-preach, and to be on guard against mistakes and the unexpected. It
entails recovering the capacities to celebrate and to be surprised.
Radical and incisive critique is an indispensable weapon. In a world
where we are enmeshed in forms of subjection, critique can support
resistance and transformation. It can be a source of intimate
reflection, unpacking things that are already sensed intuitively. By
revealing that things have not always been this way, and that they could
be different, critique can create wiggle-room for struggle. At the same
time, when reduced to a habit, a reflex, or an end in itself, critique
can become stifling and paranoid. And, we must admit, pointing to
paranoid reading and perfectionism can itself become a new form of
paranoia: a critique of critique.
These are the limits of critique. Critique can be helpful for asking how
subtle dynamics manifest themselves, or for questioning inherited ways
of doing things, but it doesn’t necessarily activate capacities to be
different with each other.
For this reason, we want to emphasize the potential of affirmative
theory, as a complementary power which might help ward off paranoia. We
talked to Silvia Federici about this because we have been struck by the
way she combines an incisive critique of Empire with an incredible
generosity towards movements. Her approach is not about being positive
all the time, but about the potential of struggle:
carla and Nick: Another thing that we wanted to talk to you about is the
style and tone of intellectual engagement. You have a really militant
critique of capitalism, but you’re always pointing to inspiring examples
in a range of different movements and you seem to reserve critique, in
terms of a really pointed attack, for large destructive institutions
like the World Bank. So we wanted to ask: is this style something that
you’ve cultivated and that you’re intentional about? And maybe more
generally, can you talk about the potential of theory in intellectual
work today? What makes theory enabling and transformative, and what gets
in the way of that?
Federici: It’s partially a consequence of growing old. You understand
things that when you’re younger you didn’t see. One thing that I’ve
learned is to be more humble and hold my judgment of people until I know
them beyond what I can make out from what they say, realizing that
people often say foolish things that they do not really believe or have
not seriously thought about.
It also comes from recognizing that we can change, which means that we
should stress our potential rather than our limits. One of the most
amazing experiences in the women’s movement was to see how much we could
grow, learning to speak in public, write poetry, make beautiful posters.
All this has given me a strong distaste for the impulse to squash
everything at the first sign that something is not right.
I’ve made it a principle not to indulge in speech that is destructive.
Striving to speak clearly, not to make people feel like fools because
they don’t understand what I say, is a good part of it. That’s also
something I’ve taken from the women’s movement. So many times we had
felt humiliated, being in situations where we didn’t understand what men
had said and didn’t have the courage to ask what they meant. I don’t
want to make other people ever feel this way.[171]
The notion of stressing potential, rather than limits, seems very
important to us. This is not just a shift in focus, but a whole
different orientation. Limits are often spoken of as if they are fixed,
and paranoid reading specializes in locating them and pointing them out.
But limits are never fixed. Limits are the always shifting edges of what
we are, what we are capable of. To explore potential is to live right at
these fluid edges. Affirmative reading is rooted in Spinoza’s insight
that we do not know in advance what a body—or a movement or struggle—can
do. This ignorance is what makes experimentation possible. Potential is
the dimension of these unfolding encounters that can never be known
beforehand.
To replace paranoid reading with affirmation is about activating a power
complementary to critique, without giving up on critical thinking.
Reading affirmatively and seeking out potentials can be a way for us to
find new resonances and experiment with concepts in new ways.
Critique—as the questioning of inherited certainties and habits—might be
necessary to remove the obstacles to all this exploration. It might tear
apart some of the rigidities that make experimentation difficult. But it
can fall into a paranoid search for problems, detached from the
immediacy of life and the potential of new encounters. Maybe some
paranoia is necessary—just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they
aren’t out to get you. Maybe it is a question of dosage and mixture,
timing and framing, of combining critique and curiosity, wariness and
exploration. We are not sure.
Wherever they appear, common notions and transformative movements can
fall prey to rigid radicalism. The shift can be subtle: what worked in a
particular place and time can be converted into a fixed how-to list. A
sense of experimentation and vitality can be sucked out of the air with
a few words that induce a sense of paranoia and lack-finding. The shared
capacity for encounters across difference can be converted into moral
certainty and guilt-mongering. What was initially transformative in one
context can be held up as the answer, a new duty, or a new set of
responsibilities that are imposed on others. This can even manifest as a
rigid insistence on autonomy and individual freedom that crushes the
potential for collective responsibility and action.
Ethics and uncertainty cannot survive long in an atmosphere of
stagnation and rigidity. Detached from the transformative relationships
that animate them, common notions become fixed principles dropped on
other people’s heads. They remain enabling and ethical only insofar as
they retain the capacity to activate response-ability: the capacity to
ask, over and over again, what might move things here and now, and to
really take pause and listen to each other deeply. All of this is to say
that ethical attunement, experimentation, and common notions are
powerful, fragile, and precious. These sensibilities are already
emerging in a lot of places, as people figure out how to sustain and
defend joy against the crushing tendencies of both Empire and rigid
radicalism.
Paranoid reading, moralism, and ideology aren’t going anywhere, and even
naming and criticizing them can be ways of slipping into their poisonous
grip, giving one a sense of superiority, of being above all those
things. The critique of rigid radicalism can manifest as a new way of
finding mistakes, or as contempt for places and people (including
oneself) where rigid radicalism takes hold. It can become a paranoid
critique of paranoia itself: criticism might be helpful to get a little
distance from stifling and hurtful dynamics, or in figuring out how they
work, but it will not necessarily activate other ways of being.
Critiques are no use unless they create openings for joy and
experimentation, and for feeling and acting differently. For us, the
best way to do this analytically has been to affirm that openings are
already happening and always have been, and that it is worth being
grateful for these powerful legacies.
In our own experience and in talking to others, becoming otherwise is
never a linear passage from one way of being to another, but a slow,
uneven, messy process. Sometimes something new emerges only in the
wreckage after groups have torn each other apart, or have people “burnt
out.” Sometimes the flight from paranoid reading flips over into an
everything-is-awesome attitude that refuses all forms of discernment and
critique. Sometimes people sense that things are not working, find bits
of joy, but then rigid radicalism takes over again in another guise.
Sometimes a dramatic event leads to new common notions and joyful ways
of relating, and rigid radicalism loses its grip. Sometimes people
abandon rigid radicalism in favor of an attempt to live a “normal” life
under Empire. Sometimes people travel and their encounters leave them
changed, more capable of cultivating collective power and
experimentation. There is no blueprint, no map for moving in other ways.
In telling these stories, we have tried to avoid generating
prescriptions for others, and we hope to have made space for a
proliferation of other stories about rigid radicalism, especially those
about how and where people have been able to undo it or relate
differently. New potentials can be activated by continuing these
conversations with each other.
Ultimately, we think, what is at stake in undoing rigid radicalism is
joyful transformation: a proliferation of forms of life that cannot be
governed by Empire nor stifled by rigid radicalism. To be militant about
this is to nurture and defend these shared powers that grow through
people’s capacities to tune into their own situations, to remain open
and experimental, and to recover and invent enabling forms of combat and
intimacy.
This is a book that does not have an ending. It is a definition that
negates itself in the same breath. It is a question, an invitation to
discuss.[172]
—John Holloway
It can be difficult to talk about the ways that radical milieus can be
stifling and rigid: how we don’t always treat each other well, how we
hurt each other, and how shame, rigidity, and competition can creep into
the very movements and spaces that are trying to undo all this. Of
course there are tangles of despair, resentment, pleasure, and pain. Of
course shitty encounters provoke anxieties and frustrations. Of course
people bring their scars and fears. In his interview, Glen Coulthard put
his finger on something we have carried with us throughout this process,
about the way that sadness and anger often stem from love:
I think that for the somber, melancholic militant, I get it. I
understand it. How could you not be? And this is my point—the only way
you respond to the world like that is because of some base sort of
individual and collective self-respect. Some love for oneself and
others, or the land, that you see being violated in a profound way. This
produces melancholy, anger, whatever. They’re not separable. So when
we’re leveling our critiques, you just have to understand that yeah,
it’s a rational response to an irrational, violent, unthinking
machinery. So how do we direct that in ways that are able to topple
these power relationships? And that’s when the kind of navel-gazing,
defensive, puritanical radical becomes an obstacle, even though they may
rightfully be that way, because of the position that they occupy. And
the process of redirection comes from community, a community that we
aspire towards and is always already there. So that’s the question: What
do we do with that situation? How do we make that community stronger? I
don’t know what the answer is, but the question is there, or else we
wouldn’t be having this conversation. We need it to be there more, with
more people.[173]
We have attempted to approach rigid radicalism with care, so that we
wouldn’t just be finding movements lacking in a whole new way. We have
tried to convey a conversation, a set of questions rather than a set of
answers. How do we talk about rigid radicalism in a way that doesn’t
just heap more shit at the feet of those who are already fighting? What
can support conversations that provide space to think and feel through
all this in milieus and movements? How can we pull each other into other
ways of being together?
We have suggested that rigid radicalism is not a solid thing outside of
us, but an affective tendency we are amidst. It circulates, constricts,
suffocates, recirculates. It brings its own pleasures and rewards. Maybe
it is driven in part by a desire to heal.
The real enemy is Empire itself, and rigid radicalism is a poisonous
reaction that presents itself as the cure. As such, rigid radicalism is
one of the ways that Empire calls forth some desires and attachments and
conjures away others, keeping its subjects stuck in a desolate form of
life. In the twilight of Empire’s legitimacy, it has become more and
more difficult to sustain the fantasy that capitalism is good for us, or
that elected leaders represent us. Governments announce sustainability
initiatives alongside new forms of resource extraction, multiculturalism
alongside militarized policing. But Empire doesn’t need our faith, only
our compliance. As Empire’s subjects, we are increasingly fastened to an
automated, industrialized infrastructure that consumes and poisons the
living world. Through the glow of our screens, we are induced to express
ourselves in perpetual performance and collective surveillance. The
crisis is not coming: it is already here. It has been here for a long
time, and Empire is administering the wreckage. We are permitted to be
as cynical and pessimistic as we want, as long as we remain detached
from capacities to live and relate differently.
In this sense, Empire cannot be confronted only by inculcating others
with the right set of anticapitalist and antistate beliefs. People do
not need some special training or education to be capable of
transformation. On the contrary, we are constantly trained away from
aliveness to change. It is not a question of being right, but of
assembling enabling ways of thinking, doing, and feeling in the present.
This is most palpable in exceptional situations of disaster and
insurrection, when everyday people have a little space from Empire’s
exhausting anxieties and routines. Amidst a lot of suffering and
scarcity, there are upwellings of mutual aid and connection. This is not
evidence of some innate altruism. For us, it is evidence that everyone
is capable of joyful transformation, and the ongoing disaster is the
brutal isolation and exploitation of life organized by Empire. An
increase in the capacity to affect and be affected—joy—means being more
in touch with a world that is bleeding, burning, screaming.
Transformation might begin with rage, hatred, or sorrow. Refusing to
“get over” some things can cut against the grain of obligatory
productivity and optimism structuring capitalist life. Shared power
might arise from accepting, refusing, hanging on, or letting go. This is
the wiggle-room of freedom: not the absence of constraint, or a
do-what-you-like individualism, but an emergent capacity to work on
relationships, shift desires, and undo ingrained habits.
We believe that close ties of friendship and kinship, far from isolating
us into cliques or enclaves, actually enable people to better extend
themselves to others and participate in transformative encounters. Close
friends and loved ones are what enable us to gripe and vent so that we
can be more compassionate and patient with those who don’t know us as
well. They help us process fears and anxieties so that we are better
able to trust people up front and move towards trouble and discomfort.
They sit with us when we inevitably fuck up and flail. In turn,
transformative struggle can deepen these bonds and generate new ones.
We have suggested that the challenge is not to build a unified
consciousness or position, but to find ways of coming together,
collaborating, fighting, and discovering shared affinities. This is not
about everyone getting along and becoming friends. Vulnerability is
important, but also risky, and needs to be selective. As Coulthard said,
“Some relationships are just bullshit and we shouldn’t be in them. We
should actually draw lines in the sand more willingly.” Joy needs sharp
edges to thrive. How to create spaces, then, where vulnerability can
happen and joyful encounters can take place? When to be open, and to
what, and how to create and maintain boundaries? What can we do
together? How can we support each other? How to create space for
consensus and dissensus and difference? How to ward off imperatives to
centralize and control things, without creating new divisions and
sectarian conflicts? How to ward off rigid radicalism and its
attachments to purity and paranoia?
These are all ethical questions that people are exploring rather than
answering once and for all. We have suggested that in the space between
abstract morality and vapid individualism, common notions can help us
remain open and responsive.
In a world of crushing monopolies, where so much is done to us or for
us, some people are recovering the capacity to do things for themselves.
From barricades to kitchen tables, they are generating collective forms
of trust and responsibility. If such forms make people feel alive, if
they deepen bonds of trust and love, militancy tends to grow along with
them because people are willing to defend these emergent powers. Every
moment that people find trust in each other and in their own capacities
is precious. Through these messy struggles, people are becoming powerful
and dangerous together.
To be militant about joy means forging common notions that can enable,
sustain, and deepen transformation here and now, starting from wherever
people find themselves. Common notions are not a means to a revolution
in the future, but the recovery of people’s capacities for autonomy and
struggle here and now. This tends towards breaking down old divides
between organizing and everyday existence, and opening the question of
collective life itself in all its expansiveness. Nurturing common
notions means refusing to separate the effectiveness of any tactic or
strategy from its affectiveness: how it makes people feel, how it
nurtures autonomy or dependence, what it opens up and what it closes
down.[174] It means letting go of practices or ideas when they stagnate,
and generating new ones together. Rather than fixed values or positions,
in common notions we find ways of doing, thinking, and feeling that
sustain the growth of shared power.
With the concept of joyful militancy, we have tried to affirm these
other ways of being without pretending that we have discovered the
answer to undoing Empire, warding off rigid radicalism, or ushering in
some world revolution. There is no single answer. We have tried to avoid
setting up joyful militancy as a new ideal to embody, or a set of
duties. It would be disappointing if the notion of joyful militancy ever
became a handbook for transformation because it lives in questions,
experiments, and openings—not answers, blueprints, or necessities.
We think people’s militancy and autonomy—their capacity to grapple with
oppression, to break from comfort and certainty in favor of risk, to
maintain forms of life that do not reproduce the state and
capitalism—depend on participation in transformative struggles. With
this in mind, we are interested in capacities to tune into
transformative potential.
One mode of attunement involves increasing sensitivity and inhabiting
situations more fully. It is in this sense that Amador Fernandez-Savater
suggests that the revolutionary alternative to control consists in
“learning to fully inhabit, instead of governing, a process of change.
Letting yourself be affected by reality, to be able to affect it in
turn. Taking time to grasp the possibles that open up in this or that
moment.” What if the capacity to be really present is revolutionary?
What potentials can be unleashed by connecting with the immediate, in a
world that encourages constant distraction, deferral, and numbness?
Crucially, this attunement is not a new form of optimism, or a newfound
faith that things will get better, but something open-ended and
dangerous. This capacity to be present, what adrienne maree brown called
“being awake inside your life in real time,” includes more of the messy
multiplicities that we are: trauma, triggers, and brilliance. Joy is not
the same as optimism. It is not happy, nor does it promise a future
revolution. In fact, being present might be a way of tuning into the
cruelty and self-destruction of certain optimistic attachments.[175]
A second form of attunement comes through the capacity to connect with
legacies of resistance, rebellion, and the struggles of the past. As
Silvia Federici explained when we interview her, this is a pushing-back
against the social amnesia imposed by Empire:
What most matters is discovering and recreating the collective memory of
past struggles. In the US there is a systematic attempt to destroy this
memory and now this is extending across the world, with the destruction
of the main historical centers of the Middle East—a form of
dispossession that has major consequences and yet is rarely discussed.
Reviving the memory of the struggles of the past makes us feel part of
something larger than our individual lives and in this way it gives a
new meaning to what we are doing and gives us courage, because it makes
us less afraid of what can happen to us individually.[176]
Reviving legacies of struggle can be a source of dignity and inspiration
amidst forces that seem implacable. In this sense, transformation is not
about the modern vision of shucking off traditions and escaping the
past. History can also help us tune into the ongoingness of antagonisms
that Empire has attempted to relegate to the past. It can help us see
and feel the ways that Empire’s institutions have been resisted since
their inception.
As cis-gendered white folks, we have a lot to learn from Black folks,
Indigenous people, people of color, and queer and trans folks who have
long resisted Empire’s violence while nurturing alternatives. There is
also a lot to be learned from others whose knowledge and capacities
continue to be devalued, and whose existence entails resistance; for us
that often means looking to the kids in our lives and community for
guidance and inspiration. We have suggested that we all have the
capacity to recover our own traditions and engage in our own struggles
(rather than appropriating others’) and to explore affinities between
them, in ways that challenge and undo the interconnected violences of
Empire.
A final mode of attunement to potential is gratitude and celebration.
Especially among white, secular radicals, gratitude is often seen as a
“hippie” value: something associated with New Age gurus and self-help
manuals that insist that positive thinking can overcome any obstacle.
Gratitude and celebration are often seen as superfluous, or even
counterproductive, as if feeling grateful requires turning away from the
horrors of Empire or losing the desire for change. But as Walidah
Imarisha suggested, celebration or gratitude can mean holding wins
attached to losses, and letting them breathe together. Grief can be
attached to gratitude, pleasure to pain, and celebration to
determination. Similarly, Zainab Amadahy emphasizes the power of
gratitude to renew our connection to the forces that sustain life, among
human and non-human relationships:
You can be thankful and still want the world to be better; want your
life to be better. At the same time, I don’t think it’s healthy to be
grateful in every moment. Sometimes grief, sadness, or fear is the
appropriate and healthy response. But when the crisis has passed or it’s
a chronic situation, focusing one’s attention on what there is to be
grateful for literally eases the pain—physical, mental, and
emotional.[177]
Throughout this project we have tried to center relationships in a
process of walking with questions. The book has morphed and changed in
significant ways as we listened and were challenged by friends and each
other. Leaving space for emergence and uncertainty was frustrating,
inspiring, difficult, and ultimately generative of a messy, joyful
process.
With this in mind, we want to share our gratitude to all those who are
resisting and undoing Empire starting from their own situations. Thank
you to those who are leaning into the uncertain work of transformation.
Thank you to those who are fiercely defending the people and places they
love. Thank you to those who are keeping their own traditions and forms
of life alive and dangerous amid forces seeking to annihilate and absorb
them.
Thank you to everyone who is part of this book. Thank you to those we
interviewed, who encouraged us and challenged us to think in new ways.
Thank you to everyone who has been part of this conversation informally,
and supported us and offered insights and care. Thank you to our readers
for your curiosity, your critical engagement, and your capacity to
cultivate joy.
January 18, 2016
Silvia Federici: My politics resonate with your idea of “joyful
militancy.” I’m a strong believer that either your politics is
liberating and that gives you joy, or there’s something wrong with them.
I’ve gone through phases of “sad politics “ myself and I’ve learned to
identify the mistakes that generate it. It has many sources. But one
factor is the tendency to exaggerate the importance of what we can do by
ourselves, so that we always feel guilty for not accomplishing enough.
When I was thinking about this conversation, I was reminded of
Nietzsche’s metamorphoses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his image of the
camel. The camel is the prototype of the militant who burdens herself
with huge amounts of work, because she thinks that the destiny of the
world depends on her overwork. Inevitably she’s always saddened because
the goal is always receding and she does not have the time to be fully
present to her life and recognize the transformative possibilities
inherent to her work.
Nick and carla: You said that you feel like there are so many sources to
sad militancy[‡] and can you speak to some more of those?
Federici: Sad militancy comes from setting goals that you cannot
achieve, so that the outcome is always out of reach, always projected
into the future and you feel continuously defeated. “Sad politics “ is
also defining your struggle in purely oppositional terms, which puts you
in a state of permanent tension and failure. A joyful politics is a
politics that is constructive and prefigurative. I’m encouraged by the
fact that more people today see that you cannot continuously postpone
the achievement of your goals to an always receding future.
Joyful politics is politics that change your life for the better already
in the present. This is not to deny that political engagement often
involves suffering. In fact our political involvement often is born of
suffering. But the joy is knowing and deciding that we can do something
about it, it is recognizing that we share our pain with other people, is
feeling the solidarity of those around us. Militants in Argentina speak
of “politicizing our sadness.”
This is why I don’t believe in the concept of “self-sacrifice,” where
self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our
desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to
repress ourselves. This has been a common practice in political
movements in the past. But it is one that produces constantly
dissatisfied individuals. Again, what we do may lead to suffering, but
this may be preferable to the kind of self-destruction we would have
faced had we remained inactive.
The inability to make politics a rewarding experience is part of the
reason why, I think, the radical Left has been unsuccessful in
attracting large numbers of people. Here too we are beginning to learn
however. I see that many young militants today are recognizing the
importance of building community, of organizing activities that are
pleasurable, that build trust and affective relations, like eating
together for instance. It is not an accident that Indigenous peoples’
movements in Latin America give so much importance to the organization
of events like the fiestas.
Nick and carla: We wanted to ask you specifically about the feminist
movement and what are some of the ways that feminists and other
movements have struggled with sad militancy in the past. We’re thinking
of Jo Freeman’s essay on “trashing” from the ‘70s, where she talks about
real tendencies to destroy relationships within the feminist
movement.[178] In one of the interviews that you’ve done, you mention
“truculent forms of behavior that were typical of the movement in the
‘60s” and that you see new forms of kindness and care emerging that
maybe were absent back then. So we wanted to ask you about how things
have changed from your perspective, and whether you see a connection
between trashing and what is now called call-out culture in contemporary
movements.
Federici: When I wrote about truculent behavior, I was thinking of
relations in the male Left and male-dominated organizations, where you
found a lot of protagonism and peacock-like competition, as well as a
manipulation of women, sexual and otherwise. These were among the
factors that motivated the rise of the women’s liberation movement. Not
only women’s demands were pushed off the agenda, but everyday relations
were often degrading for them.
A good description of women’s lives in male-dominated organizations is
Marge Piercy’s “The Grand Coolie Dam,”[179] where she powerfully
describes the many forms of subordination women suffered in
male-dominated groups. In comparison, the organizational forms the
women’s movement adopted were a major improvement. Possibly feminists
moved too far in the opposite direction. I am thinking of Jo Freeman’s
critique of the “tyranny of structurelessness.”[180] But she’s
excessively critical of the feminist movement. I don’t agree that
feminists were especially prone to trashing each other. The attack on
leadership, for instance, though it often worked against people’s
capacity to express themselves, also opened the way to more egalitarian
relations—like ensuring that everyone would have a change to speak in a
meeting. The resistence against women getting credit for authoring
articles or speaking too much in public was a legacy of the experiences
we had made in male-dominated organizations. In time, it is a fear that
most women left behind, as they felt more confident in their own powers.
Some of the bitterness that you find in Jo Freeman comes perhaps from
the fact that, when we joined the women’s movement, many of us believed
that we had reached a sort of paradise. As I wrote in “Putting Feminism
On Its Feet,” when I began to work with other women I truly felt that I
had found my home, my tribe.[181] We thought that we had reached a place
where everything would be harmonious; where there would be love, care,
reciprocity, equality, cooperation—sisterhood as we called it. So we
dis-activated our critical thinking and left our defenses down.
Unfortunately, we didn’t reach paradise, and the disappointment was
especially severe because we assumed that in the women’s movement we
would find happiness, or at least we would not encounter the kind of
jealousies, power plays, and power relations we had experienced with
men.
Spinoza speaks of Joy as coming from Reason and Understanding. But we
forgot that all of us bear on our bodies and minds the marks of life in
a capitalist society. We forgot that we came to the feminist movement
with many scars and fears. We would feel devalued and easily take
offense if we thought we were not properly valued. It was a jealousy
that came from poverty, from fear of not being given our due. This also
led some women to be possessive about what they had done, what they had
written or said.
These are all the classical problems and distortions that life in a
capitalist society creates. Over time you learn to identify them, but at
first, many of us were devastated by them. For me coping with this
realization has been an important learning process. But I have also seen
women leaving the movement because they were so deeply hurt by it.
On the other hand, the feminist movement, because it stressed the
importance of sharing experiences and engaging in a collective
examination of our everyday lives and problems, gave us important tools
to deal with this situation. Through “consciousness-raising” and the
refusal to separate politics from our everyday reproduction it created
forms of organization that built trust and showed that our strength was
rooted in our mutual solidarity.
I found a vision in the women’s movement that allowed me to overcome
some bitter experiences and over time insulated me from disappointment.
I see politics now as a process of transformation; a process by which we
learn to better ourselves, shed our possessiveness and discard the petty
squabbles that so much poison our lives.
I think that this has been a collective experience that has left a mark
on other organizations as well. It seems to me that, over the last two
or three decades, the women’s movement has been the most important
influence on the organizational forms of most radical movements. You
don’t find today, on a general level, the kind of behavior that was
common among men thirty or forty years ago, not at least among the new
generations, although there is still a good amount of machismo around.
But you also have men who genuinely want to be feminist, and define
themselves as anti-patriarchal, or organize against male supremacy—all
unthinkable stands—with few exceptions—in the ‘60s.
carla: I have all these questions! There seems to be some kind of
paradox in this: that joy is about feelings and relationships, but not
just an individual feeling. And while we want to speak to the power of
joy, it can’t be turned into a commandment, and in fact it gets lost
when it becomes something imposed on people. But it also can’t be about
just feeling happy or feeling good, or being okay with the way things
are. It feels like a little bit of a paradox and I haven’t figured out
how to think that through. A lot of my activism over the years has been
around youth liberation and working with children having more of a say,
and getting that form of oppression into the discussion and into
activist spaces, and my work was very centered around that in a public
way. I don’t want to replicate individualism in liberation; I want it to
always be connected to the larger systems and social struggles. But it
also needs to be about thriving right now, because they’re kids! And
when things were working well it seemed that there was a lot of room for
freedom and growth but it was held and felt collectively, without a
bunch of rules or norms. There was happiness, sure, but also difficulty
and a willingness to work through it. So it feels like a constant
paradox to work through joy …
Federici: I like the distinction between happiness and joy. Like you, I
like joy because it is an active passion. It’s not a static state of
being. And it’s not satisfaction with things as they are. It’s part of
feeling powers and capacities growing within yourself and in the people
around you. It’s a feeling, a passion, that comes from a process of
transformation and growth. It does not mean that you’re satisfied with
your situation. It means, again using Spinoza, that you’re active in
accordance to what your understanding tells you to do and what is
required by the situation. So you feel that you have the power to change
and feel yourself changing through what you’re doing, together with
other people. It’s not a form of acquiescence to what exists.
Nick and carla: We’ve found your concept of the accumulation of
divisions really compelling, and the ways you’re centering how
capitalism is always using white supremacy, patriarchy, colonization,
and other oppressive hierarchies to create divisions and enable
exploitation. Your historicization of those divisions is powerful,
because you show how the state and capitalism have deepened and
entrenched patriarchy and racism as a strategy to stop resistance and
enable more intense exploitation. And for us, in this book we really
want to center the importance of rebuilding trust and connection and
solidarity across those divisions, while leaving space for difference
and autonomy. One of the things that we like about your work is that you
don’t jump to a simple unity—that overcoming these divisions doesn’t
look like a simple unity. And so we wanted to ask you to talk about that
a little more. Is there a distinction between divisions, which are
hierarchical and exploitative, and differences, which might be something
else? And can you talk about the positive horizon you see for resisting
the accumulation of divisions while warding off a kind of homogenizing
unity?
Federici: Yes, the distinction between differences and divisions is
important. When I speak of “divisions” I speak of differences that carry
hierarchies, inequalities, and have a divisive power. So, we need to be
very clear when we speak of “differences.” Not all should be celebrated.
The lesson we learned in the ‘60s from the women’s movement and the
Black Power movement is that the most effective way to respond to
unequal relations is for those who have less social power to organize
autonomously. This does not exclude the possibility of coming together
for particular struggles. But in a society divided along racial and
gender lines, unity is a goal to be achieved, not something that can be
assumed to already exist. Organizational autonomy, or at least the
construction of autonomous spaces within mixed organizations—as it often
happens in Latin America—is a necessary condition to subvert these
divisions. The women’s movement could not have developed the
understanding of the situation of women that it developed if women had
remained in male-dominated organizations. It was crucial for women to
move away from these organizations to even begin to think about their
problems and share their thoughts with each other.
You cannot think of a problem, give voice to it, share it with others,
if you fear that you will be dismissed, ridiculed, or told that it is
not important. Moreover, how could women have spoken of sexuality and
their relations with men in front of them? And how could Black militants
speak openly of their experience of racism in front of white people?
Autonomy within movements that are working toward unity but are
traversed by power relations is fundamental. A crucial reality would
have remained hidden if the feminist movement had not organized
autonomously and this is also true of the Black Power movement.
Important areas and forms of exploitation would have continued to be
unnoticed; would not have been analyzed and denounced and would have
continued to be reproduced.
Nick and carla: You often point to Latin America and other places where
the social fabric is much stronger in general, and movements are a lot
more capable of reproducing themselves and meeting their own needs,
relying less on the state and capital. The maintenance of communal and
cooperative forms of life seems to be central to the capacity for
sustained struggle and resistance. Can you elaborate on all this?
Federici: I went to Nigeria in the ‘80s and one of the big surprises for
me was to discover that large amounts of land were still managed
communally. That doesn’t mean that in communal land regimes
relationships are necessarily egalitarian. Generally men have more power
than women; but until recently they could not sell the land. Clearly
these communal regimes have gone through many changes, especially
because of colonial domination. But the fact that communal ownership has
been widespread in Africa until at least the nineteenth century and, in
some regions, continues even today, has had a deep impact on
relationships and people, which is why I believe so much violence has
been and is necessary to privatize the land and the continent’s immense
natural resources.
It’s the same thing in Latin America. In Mexico, in the 1930s, during
the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, some land was returned to indigenous
communities that had been expropriated by colonial invasion. Today the
Mexican government is trying to re-privatize everything, but until
recently at least thirty percent of the country’s land was still held
communally.
Again, this is not a guarantee of egalitarian relations. Women in these
communities are coming forward, criticizing the patriarchal relations
often prevailing within them. A good example are the Zapatista women. As
you can read in Hilary Klein’s book Compañeras, many of the
transformations that have taken place in Zapatista communities, like the
application of the Revolutionary Law On Women, have been the product of
the struggle that women have made against patriarchalism. But communal
land regimes guarantee the reproduction of the communities that live on
the land.
Today many of these communities are facing dispossession because of land
privatization, deforestation, the loss of water to irrigate their
milpas. But when they are forced out and come to the cities, they still
act as a collectivity. They take over land though collective action,
they build encampments, and take decision collectively. As a result, in
many cities of Latin America, new communities have formed that from
their beginning were built collectively. It appears that the narcos now
try to infiltrate some of these communities. But when people take over
the land and cooperate to build their houses, to build the streets, to
fight with the government to connect the electricity and get water
pipes, there is a good chance that that they will be able to respond to
this threat, and you can see that there’s a new social reality emerging
in these communities.
As Raúl Zibechi often points out, something new is emerging in these
communities because they have had to invent new forms of life, without
any pre-existing model, and politicize the everyday process of their
reproduction.[182] When you work together, building houses, building
streets, building structures that provide some immediate form of
healthcare—just to give some examples—you are making life-choices, as
all of them come with a high cost. You must fight the state, fight the
police, the local authorities. So you have to develop tight relations
with each other and always measure the value of all things.
Nick and carla: Following up on that, part of what we are curious about
is how we can learn from places where, in general, the degree of
politicization is higher and the social fabric is much stronger. What
kind of lessons can North American–based organizers draw from this for
organizing in our own communities? How can people in the global North
learn from all of the vibrant struggles and forms of life in Latin
America while being attentive to differences in context at the same
time?
Federici: This is a discussion that is taking place in New York. People
in the social movements who are inspired by the struggles in Latin
America are now thinking in terms of territorial politics, the territory
being a place where you have some form of collective control and even
self-government. Clearly, the situation in the US is profoundly
different. But thinking in terms of territory enables us to see that the
neighborhoods in which we live are not neutral spaces, they are not just
conglomerates of houses and people. They are very politically
structured. In New York, for instance, since the ‘70s, there’s been a
process of “spatial de-concentration,” whereby every neighborhood has
been studied by local and federal authorities to figure out how to
better control the movement of people and guarantee that the wrong
people do not go to certain neighborhoods. Subway lines, bus lines,
playgrounds have been restructured, to make sure that poor people cannot
easily go to places of wealth.
So looking at our neighborhoods as “territories” in this case means
recognizing those factors of tension, of crisis, those power relations
that traverse them that divide people but can also bring them together.
The social centers that have opened in recent years in New York are
attempting to do that, trying to engage in practices that create
“territory,” that is, create forms of aggregation. Building more
collective forms of reproduction is a key aspect of this process. It is
indispensable if we want to create “communities of resistance,” spaces
where people are connected and can engage in some collective
decision-making.
Nick and carla: Maybe one thing to follow up on this. In that question
you talked about the forgotten impacts of really subtle things like
architecture, planning, and in Caliban and the Witch you talk about the
forgotten impacts of the witch hunts, and how those impacts are still
with us today. Are there underappreciated movements of joy and
transformation where we haven’t fully appreciated the impacts?
Federici: There are so many movements. The Suffragette movement, for
example, is always portrayed as a bourgeois movement, but I’m
discovering that it had a working-class dimension as well. But rather
than thinking of particular movements, what most matters is discovering
and recreating the collective memory of past struggles. In the US there
is a systematic attempt to destroy this memory and now this is extending
across the world, with the destruction of the main historical centers of
the Middle East—a form of dispossession that has major consequences and
yet is rarely discussed. Reviving the memory of the struggles of the
past makes us feel part of something larger than our individual lives
and in this way it gives a new meaning to what we are doing and gives us
courage, because it makes us less afraid of what can happen to us
individually.
Nick and carla: Another thing that we wanted to talk to you about is the
style and tone of intellectual engagement. Your style is so generous,
and you have a really militant critique of capitalism, but you’re always
pointing to examples in a range of different movements and you seem to
reserve really pointed attacks for large destructive institutions like
the World Bank. It seems to us that this differs from a lot of radical
critique today, which can be very focused on exposing complicities or
limitations, talking about the ways that movements are lacking, that
they haven’t yet reached this or that, as well as targeting individuals.
So we wanted to ask: Is this style something that you’ve cultivated and
that you’re intentional about, and maybe more generally, can you talk
about the potential of theory in intellectual work today, and what
joyful theory might look like? What makes theory enabling and
transformative, and what gets in the way of that?
Federici: It’s partially a consequence of growing old. You understand
things that when you’re younger you didn’t see. One thing that I’ve
learned is to be more humble and to hold my judgment of people until I
know them beyond what I can make out from what they say, realizing that
people often say foolish things that they do not really believe or have
not seriously thought about.
It also comes from recognizing that we can change, which means that we
should stress our potential rather than our limits. One of the most
amazing experiences in the women’s movement was to see how much we could
grow, learning to speak in public, write poetry, make beautiful posters.
All this has given me a strong distaste for the impulse to squash
everything at the first sign that something is not right.
I’ve made it a principle not to indulge in speech that is destructive.
Striving to speak clearly, not to make people feel like fools because
they don’t understand what I say, is a good part of it. That’s also
something I’ve taken from the women’s movement. So many times we had
felt humiliated, being in situations where we didn’t understand what men
had said, and didn’t have the courage to ask what they meant. I don’t
want to make other people ever feel this way.
Nick and carla: You’re really good at that! One of the things we were
talking about this morning is the question of identity and a lot of the
critiques of sad militancy that we have read really make identity into
the problem quite a bit more than we would want to. We’re trying to
think through how to speak to the power of identity and experience while
also pointing to power of transformation and working across difference,
and how the two of those aren’t antithetical in the way they’re
sometimes set up, that they’re crucial for each other.
Federici: I think the critique of identity has taken on dimensions that
are not always justified. What people often criticize as identity is
actually the position that a person has had in the capitalist
organization of work. For example, is being a housewife an identity?
Yes, it’s an identity, but it is also a particular place in the
capitalist organization of work, like being a miner, it’s also a
particular form of exploitation. Identity is often used in a way that
hides that exploitation. That’s when it becomes problematic.
Moreover, behind identity there’s also a history of struggle and
resistance to exploitation. Identity can be a signpost for a whole
history of struggle. When I say I am a feminist, for instance, I
consciously connect myself to history of struggle that women have made.
Identities can be mutable as well. “Woman,” for example, is not a fixed
identity. The concept of woman has undergone a tremendous change over
the last fifty years.
The problem has been the wedding of “identity” with the politics of
rights, as when we speak of women’s rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights,
as if each group were entitled to a packet of entitlements, but in
isolation from each other, so that we lose sight of the commonalities
and the possibility of a common struggle.
Nick and carla: That’s really helpful. Our last question is about hope.
Spinoza himself is pretty wary of hope, but he sees it as quite
future-oriented: to hope is also to fear, because you’re attached to a
future object or outcome. More generally hope is often equated with a
naïve optimism: it can become fixated on a certain outcome. But in one
of your interviews,[183] you talked about it as something that’s a lot
more open-ended. It’s more the sense that we can do something. Do you
think that hope is necessarily attached to a vision of the future?
Federici: Hope is positive if it is an active passion; but only if it
does not replace the work necessary to make our action successful.
Silvia Federici is an Italian activist and author of many works,
including Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework,
Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the
International Feminist Collective and organizer with the Wages for
Housework Campaign in the ‘70s. She was a member of the Midnight Notes
Collective.
with Kelsey Cham C.
Kelsey Cham C. is a former collective member of the Purple Thistle who
worked with carla as a youth at the Thistle.
Nick and carla: One of the things we’re trying to think through with the
notion of sad militancy is the way that Empire gets smuggled into
radical movements in spaces through mistrust, fear, rigidity, shame,
competition, and so on … but we want to think this through without
blaming individuals. It’s not about individual feelings or behaviors;
it’s about ways of relating that are coming out of this system.
Kelsey: Yeah, we’re recreating it.
Nick and carla: Yeah, and we’re interested in talking to people that
seem to be able to tap into something different, and I think you do
that.
Kelsey: (laughs) I’m glad you think so.
Nick and carla: I guess the first question is: does this resonate, does
this description of sad militancy make sense to you?
Kelsey: Yeah, it’s funny because I don’t use those terms, but I find
myself in situations where we’re having conversations about the exact
same things, but with many different folks who are politically aware and
trying to create change. It is really hard to not fall into sad
militancy; I catch myself being overly critical of either myself or
other people in their efforts to organize and create something better
and new, or something that’s never been done before. It’s frustrating,
and I find myself asking “why is this happening, this constant
critique?” It’s totally internalized capitalist patriarchal shit.
I think it’s connected to perfectionism and the desire to do things “the
right way” that becomes a part of us—it’s hard to not recreate that when
that’s how you grew up and have learned that this is what’s true.
Nick and carla: So what do you think made you get to a place where
you’re able to catch yourself and do something else?
Kelsey: That’s a really good question … well, all those things are super
isolating. Most people in this culture have experienced that pretty
in-depth in their personal lives. I have, and when I’m critical of
myself or other people, I try to strive for something that doesn’t
exist, I’m always unhappy and I get frustrated, I get angry, I can get
violent … those are things that aren’t productive.
I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s one specific thing; I don’t even
know if I’m very good at being joyfully militant or whatever. I think my
background in karate has helped, though … And basically recognizing that
we’re all in this together and we all have a common goal, and making
efforts to love each other—not just tolerate each other—but actually see
how we can feel love for everyone to some degree. I think we’re
capable—maybe that’s naïve or whatever—but I think we’re capable of
doing that … that’s probably arguable too.
Nick and carla: Do you think there are things that make rigidity or sad
militancy spread?
Kelsey: Yeah for sure, I think people get sucked into stuff, right? I
found myself going back to what’s comfortable. If I’m part of a group
and people start hating on a certain thing in a way, I think it’s easy
for me to get caught up in that. It’s something that I try to catch
myself doing and recognize that’s not how I feel at all … it’s old
patterns coming up again, and when you’re in new situations it’s easy
for those patterns to come out.
Nick and carla: Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift
from joyful militancy to sad militancy, or vice versa?
Kelsey: Yes, I would say so. I think I’ve seen spaces where everything
has ups and downs, and people have ups and downs—going from sad to
joyful to sad again—it’s exciting and then a key person leaves, or a
project falls through, or maybe people are not happy with the way that
everyone is contributing … sometimes that energy falls or maybe people
lose interest.
But sometimes I can shift the energy of an entire crew of people … I
find that usually, when people are able to recognize that we’re all in
this together and it’s not a battle against each other. I think that’s
usually what it is: having that foundation of common vision or goals or
whatever. And usually there’s someone who is able to be joyful … in the
same way that sad militancy is contagious, joy is also contagious;
people get excited by new energy.
Nick and carla: What do you think encourages and sustains joyful
militancy?
Kelsey: I dunno … I’m pretty new to this whole way of being I guess, but
I think humility is a huge part of it, and also community credit—“we did
that together”—and celebrating tiny accomplishments can be really
awesome; celebrating each other’s accomplishments, and respecting that
stuff. I think part of the sad militancy—just to go back to how it
catches on—is because I think in our society we learn to be overly
critical and perfectionist … it’s so easy to criticize people’s work and
what they’re doing without recognizing what they’re trying to do and
what they’re actually accomplishing. At the same time, criticism can be
a gift for everyone involved when it’s about learning and figuring
things out together.
Nick and carla: So it’s not even that criticism equals sad militancy; is
there a way to do criticism that can be joyful?
Kelsey: Oh, totally. I was just talking about this with a friend the
other day. I think it’s important to talk to people about how they
receive criticism and how they would want to, or if they even can
safely, I guess. But for me I think it’s really, really, really awesome
when people give me feedback and constructive criticism in a respectful
way; even if it’s in a non-respectful way, I’ll take it, I might be
angry about it, it might make me irritable or hate on something, but
I’ll absorb it as well. All criticisms are gifts because they’re
perspectives that I probably didn’t have before and I can work with. And
I acknowledge that I can’t make everyone happy and that’s not what I’m
trying to do. I want to be as inclusive as possible with the work that
I’m doing, but there’s no way that every single person is gonna be super
stoked about it. And to receive criticism I also need to have a positive
feedback system, where it’s like: if I receive 10 things I’m doing
so-called “wrong,” it will make me feel like I’m not doing anything
right, and I don’t know what to keep and what to change. It’s like if
you’re playing cards and you think I’m just gonna fold and leave every
time. But probably there are some things I should keep, so positive
feedback is also really important.
carla and Nick: We want to talk about the importance of trust, and the
radical potential of trust, without turning trust into some commandment.
Does this resonate? Can you talk about the potential of trusting folks
up front, and how you saw it play out at the Thistle?
Kelsey: Yeah totally, I think that’s awesome. Actually I think you
[carla] were one of the first people to actually trust me without even
knowing me. And I was like what the hell? Why? Why? How do you know I’m
not gonna just fuck everything up and run away and steal a bunch of
money and go? How do you know that? But in trusting me, I was like, holy
shit: I trust this situation and this collective twenty times more and I
want to give back to it because I’ve been given this opportunity to do
something that I’ve never been able to do before, which is awesome.
But I have been thinking about trust and how with trauma we build all
these walls and we start to mistrust everything. I have a pretty hard
time trusting people. There’s a point where I’m like, this is too
personal and too intimate and now my walls are going to go up. I was
sitting and thinking about how it’s probably one of the best ways to
break down the walls of the system is to break down the walls around
each other first, and I think that requires trust.
Joyful Militancy and trust, and compassion, and humility are all tied
together, I think: in other cultures, traditional cultures—I don’t know
a lot about this—but from what I know, older Indigenous cultures have
these ideas of respect, humility, compassion, and I think in karate I’ve
seen it and it’s interesting because karate is a martial art, a fighting
tool, and one of the things that we learn is that we have to love
everyone including our opponents. And that’s the toughest thing to say
in this community. People are like “what the fuck, how can you say that,
you can’t just love your abuser.” And it’s true, I can’t just let go of
everything. It’s not that; it’s being compassionate, I think, to
situations.
carla and Nick: What makes it hard to nurture trust? What’s been your
experience with trust in your everyday? And in radical spaces?
Kelsey: I feel like trauma is the biggest hurdle for me. From what I see
happening around me and my own self, a lot of people—not everyone—but a
lot of people who are politically involved and radical are there because
they’re the short stick: they’ve been oppressed and traumatized. That’s
often what leads people to these ideas and values, maybe? Well, for me
that’s true … but I think when we lose trust in anything—either family,
or relationships, or the system that we’re part of—we build walls to
protect ourselves. And it takes a lot of work to break down those walls,
and we need to trust, and when you’re trying to defend yourself all the
time, and you don’t trust anything, it’s like a sad circle—a
catch-22—and that’s what I’ve seen go on. It’s not just about organizing
in the community, it’s not just about unlearning belief systems; it’s
also unlearning ways of being in ourselves and that takes a lot of work
and a lot of that shit nobody wants to look at or bring up again. And I
know a lot of people are like, “this thing keeps coming up and I’m
blocking it because it’s too scary.” And I think that that’s keeping us
isolated and rigid.
carla and Nick: So there’s like a comfort and safety in remaining rigid,
skeptical, untrusting?
Kelsey: There is! This whole world is based on fucking misery and to be
joyful is scary because it’s kind of unknown. In capitalist systems,
we’re not meant to feel joy; I think it’s about domination and power and
gaining respect by taking part, but it has nothing to do with joy. Even
now, I feel like people judge me for being too positive and too happy;
people think I’m way younger than I am often because of my attitude;
they’re like “why aren’t you bitter yet?” It’s really interesting
because it’s scary to feel new things and not know where they’re going
to take you.
carla and Nick: Can we have the expectation of trust up front? Do you
think there’s an alternative to the idea that trust always needs to be
earned?
Kelsey: It’s so hard in our society: you gotta earn everything; you earn
money, you build trust, and respect. You gotta prove to me that I should
trust you, or respect you. And that’s an interesting point; I have a
tough time with that, trusting people. But I think it’s a feedback
system: probably the more you allow yourself to trust people initially,
probably the more well-reciprocated that will be. I felt it: you trust
me and I didn’t understand it. That’s how fucked up our system is. Even
though I didn’t do anything wrong, or to harm you, I didn’t understand
how someone could trust me without knowing me first.
Nick and carla: There’s this perception that all this stuff—trust,
curiosity, uncertainty, joy—is naïve: if you’re joyful or trusting you
probably just don’t understand what’s going on, or how bad things are.
And with that, there’s a perception that only people who are super
privileged have the capacity to be joyful. How do you think about joyful
militancy and trust in relation to privilege and oppression?
Kelsey: I think some of the most joyful people I’ve met are not coming
from privileged backgrounds. I don’t think it’s true that only
privileged people can be joyful. It’s a blanket statement and it’s also
kind of really oppressive and ignorant to say, I think. I think that’s
harsh for me to say, but I think that there’s a lot of people and
friends that are coming from privileged backgrounds are some of the most
rigid people and the most isolated. They don’t feel at ease and they’re
not comfortable, they’re guilty. A lot of privilege makes it difficult
to learn how to work cooperatively. But I’ve seen the effectiveness and
power—I don’t mean power like people who dominate—I mean power like the
energy that comes from compassion and love and real collective work and
humility. Humility’s such a huge one.
It’s part of our society to discount that all that as naïve. Naïve is
inexperience—what is inexperience? It comes from an ageist perspective:
you’re young, you only think like this because you’re young; you haven’t
experienced enough. Actually some of the youngest people—kids—are often
the most connected and able to absorb and create. It is ageist to
associate joyfulness with naïveté. Maybe that’s super harsh to say but I
think it comes from our society’s idea of what it means to be an adult,
a youth, a child. Those systems are in place to keep us fuckin’
stagnant, and to keep kids stagnant and devalued and powerless.
carla and Nick: Yeah that’s a useful way for us to think about it
because it’s easy to make all this into another set of norms: “just be
this way.” It’s hard to talk about this in other ways, maybe because
part of rigid militancy and activist-speak is constantly prescribing
behaviors, and it’s easy to hear joyful militancy as another
prescription.
Kelsey: Maybe it’s not a prescription, it is a practice … I’m excited
because I’ve been having these conversations with friends. I think it’s
really awesome that you’re really intentionally introducing this.
Because I think probably the amount of work it must have taken you
(carla) to just start off trusting people is a fuck-load, probably … and
I’m realizing how important it is to share that … once we have
something, we can share it with younger folks so that they don’t have to
go through the same struggles to get to these points. I feel like what
I’m learning is probably at a way earlier stage in my life than when you
probably learned it. And I’ll be able to pass that on to the kids in my
life when they’re way younger, like four or five, starting to introduce
these ideas, and they won’t have to face the same struggles again, and
we can go deeper, and it’s exciting.
Kelsey Cham C. is a community organizer and settler of Chinese and Irish
descent. Being involved with projects like the Purple Thistle has
brought them depth and insight into trying to understand what the hell
is going on in the world. Kelsey is focused on organizing experiential
learning projects with youth and adults in gardening, mycology,
fermentation, and “ki” (chi) based karate.
Though we have used direct quotes and endnotes as a way to acknowledge
our intellectual debts and sources throughout the book, we often found
ourselves wanting to include more of the currents and perspectives that
have shaped this work. With that in mind, we have assembled some
articles, zines, books, films, interviews, and stories for those who
want to go further with some of the ideas explored in each chapter,
providing links to online versions where possible. This list is diverse,
and elements of these texts are in tension with each other and our own
work, and we think they are all worth approaching in the spirit of
critical and affirmative reading. We also recommend checking out work by
everyone we interviewed and cited, and we are planning to create a
fuller list on our website: joyfulmilitancy.com
Smashwords Edition, 2013 (non-fiction book).
Zoopraxiscope,” Hostis 2, 2016 (essay).
Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, AK Press 2015
(collected short fiction).
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en.
Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2004 (non-fiction book).
2005 (non-fiction book).
https://archive.org/stream/InterviewWithBrianMassumi/intmassumi_djvu.txt.
http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/bb_3.pdf.
the Revolutions of Everyday Life, Minor Compositions, 2009 (non-fiction
book),
http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ImaginalMachines-web.pdf.
University of Toronto Press, 2005 (non-fiction book).
from Aristotle to Tiqqun (blog post),
https://humanstrike.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/robot-seals-as-counter-insurgency-friendship-and-power-from-aristotle-to-tiqqun/.
Movements, Between the Lines, 2005 (non-fiction book).
post/zine),
https://knowingtheland.com/2014/01/28/new-zine-collecting-towards-and-anarchist-ecology/.
International Division of Labour, Zed Books, 2014 (non-fiction book).
Communities of Connection,” 2014 (video recorded talk),
http://emmatalks.org/session/leanne-simpson/.
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/decolonizing-together
2015 (documentary).
Remaking the Soil of Cultures, Zed Books, 1998 (non-fiction book).
Press, 2008 (non-fiction anthology).
or Does it?” (video lecture),
http://www.johnholloway.com.mx/2015/10/05/greecehope-drowns-in-the-reality-of-a-dying-world-or-does-it/.
Prison, and Redemption, AK Press, 2016 (creative non-fiction).
(non-fiction book),
introduction to post-civilized theory,” Strangers in a Tangled
Wilderness, 2010 (zine),
http://www.tangledwilderness.org/take-what-you-need-and-compost-the-rest/.
book).
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/.
Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations, Arbeiter Ring, 2008
(non-fiction anthology).
2010 (non-fiction book).
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972 (non-fiction book).
http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.
Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, South End
Press, 2009 (non-fiction anthology).
2014 (zine),
https://cloudfront.crimethinc.com/pdfs/We-Are-All-Very-Anxious.pdf.
book),
http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/GeneologyofMorals.pdf.
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture.
Anarchist Theory 29, 2016 (essay),
https://anarchiststudies.org/2017/03/09/radical-language-in-the-mainstream-by-kelsey-cham-c/.
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/ideology.php.
letter for insurgent dreamers,” (essay) in Emergency Hearts, AK Press,
2015,
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Viking Press, 1977,
http://cnqzu.com/library/Philosophy/Deleuze,%20Gilles%20and%20Felix%20Guattari-AntiOedipus.pdf.
Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, AK Press, 2012.
You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” (essay)
in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University
Press, 2003,
https://sydney.edu.au/arts/slam/downloads/documents/novel_studies/3_Sedgwick.pdf
Times, University of Minnesota Press, 2016 (non-fiction book).
(essay) in Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, AK
Press, 2006, http://trabal.org/texts/grumpywarriorcool.pdf.
of Political Passion,” New Formations 68, 2009 (academic article),
http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Thoburn-Weatherman-the-Militant-Diagram-and-the-Problem-of-Political-Passion.pdf.
Active
Joyful passions give us clues about becoming active in the growth of
joy, opening the potential for tuning into, stoking, amplifying,
modulating, and tending to emergent powers. To become active in joyful
transformation is to become capable of participating in the forces that
increase one’s capacity to affect and be affected. To become capable of
feeling and doing new things always requires an openness and
vulnerability, and active participation requires a capacity to sustain
this openness to change. The desire for full control or independence
remains trapped in passivity, because learning to participate in joy’s
unfolding means being partially undone and transformed through an
open-ended, uncontrollable process.
Affect
Affect is at the heart of Spinoza’s philosophy of a “world in the
making,” in which things are defined not by what they are but by what
they do: how they affect and are affected. To attend to affect means
becoming attuned to the relations and encounters that compose us, right
here and right now. To be affected intensely won’t feel
straightforwardly good or happy because intense affects are what
transform, undo, and remake us. Emotions are a capturing of affect—a way
of registering some of the forces that compose us. There can be no
handbook for affect, because each encounter—each transition we
undergo—is unique. No one knows what a body is capable of, and one only
learns by experimenting: by becoming capable of new things. The capacity
to affect and be affected leads to questions at the heart of this book:
how do we affect each other? How can we become more capable, attuned,
and alive together? What gets in the way of all this, and how might some
of these obstacles be affective: intertwined with our comfort, safety,
happiness, habits and pleasures?
Affinity
The notion of affinity that we draw on comes from anarchism but
stretches beyond the “affinity group” in which people who trust each
other get together for a particular action. Organizing and connecting by
affinity is an alternative (and sometimes a complement) to organizing on
the basis of pre-existing ideologies, identities, and interests. It
basically means encountering each other and seeing how it goes,
searching for something shared that is emergent rather than
pre-existing. It orients us to the question of what we might be able to
do together, rather than (only) who we are and what we should do. To
find affinity, in this sense, is not about finding people who are “like
us” or who we “like,” but about searching out connections and alliances
through which we increase our powers and capacities.
Common notions
Common notions are not fixed ideas but shared thinking-feeling-doings
that support joyful transformation. As such, they require uncertainty,
experimentation, and flexibility amidst changing circumstances, and they
exist in tension with fixed systems of morality and ideology. Common
notions are processes through which people figure things out together
and become active in joy’s unfolding, learning to participate in and
sustain new capacities. We suggest that trust and responsibility can be
emergent and relational common notions, rather than fixed duties. In a
certain way, common notions are fragile: if they are turned into fixed
ways of doing things or moral commandments, detached from the ethical
responsiveness that animated them, they die.
Conviviality
To undo Empire’s radical monopolies entails participating in convivial
forms of life: assemblages of tools, feelings, infrastructures, habits,
skills, and relationships that enable and support the flourishing of
creativity, autonomy, collective responsibility, and struggle.
Conviviality gets at the way in which people are able to figure out
things for themselves, from transformative justice that undoes
dependence on cops and courts, to regenerative forms of subsistence that
support a diversity of non-human critters, to alternatives to school
that enable intergenerational learning, to all of the innumerable ways
that people are reviving and inventing ways of living and dying that
break Empire’s monopoly over life today.
Deschooling
We use deschooling in two different ways. The act of deschooling is a
process whereby a previously schooled person learns to shed habits and
behaviors inculcated through schooling. Deschooling is also used to
describe the creation of alternatives to schools and institutionalized
education by generating learning environments that work from
nonhierarchal relationships between learners and mentors. This means
recognizing that we are always learning, everywhere, and that sharing
knowledge works in all directions and relationships (a child can teach
an adult, and so on).
Empire
Empire is the name for the organized catastrophe in which we live today.
It is not really an “it” but a tangle of habits, tendencies, and
apparatuses that sustain exploitation and control. We argue that it
entrenches and accumulates sadness: it crushes and co-opts forces of
transformation and detaches people from their own powers and capacities.
It keeps us passive, stuck in forms of life in which everything is done
to us or for us. This takes place through overt violence and repression,
and the entrenchment of hierarchical divisions like heteropatriarchy and
racism, by inducing dependence on institutions and markets, and by
affective control and subjection.
Ethics
We suggest that ethics—and ethical attunement—is an enabling alternative
to morality. Ethics is a space that lies beyond morality and an
anything-goes relativism. This conception runs against the grain of many
standard definitions of ethics that basically conceive it as an
individual version of morality (ethical consumption, ethical principles,
and other rules to live by). Rather than a fixed set of principles,
ethics means becoming attuned to the complexity of the world and our
immersion in it. It means actively working on and reshaping
relationships, cultivating some ties and severing others, and figuring
out how to do without the fixed rules of ideology or morality. It
entails the capacity for responsibility, not as a fixed duty, but as
response-ability—the capacity to be responsive to relationships and
encounters. Compared to morality, ethics entails more fidelity to our
relations in their immediacy—to all the forces that compose us and
affect us—not less.
Forms of life
The concept of a “form of life” is borrowed from Tiqqun, and we have
used it synonymously with “worlds,” without unpacking it rigorously, in
favor of focusing on other concepts. Every form of life has an affective
and ethical consistency. A form of life is irreducible to the people,
practices, desires, and feelings that compose it—inseparable from the
way people feel, from the questions they have, from their subtle
gestures, from the place where they live and the non-human elements
there. Forms of life are not stable units that can be represented with
precision, with a fixed inside and outside; instead, they are patterned
relations in movement. In this sense, the concept of a form of life
orients us to the texture of life here and now. The forms of life proper
to Empire are characterized by a paradoxical attenuation of intensity
and joy—the very things that subtend forms of life. Empire’s apparatuses
of subjection nurture an attenuated form of life in which desire is
turned against itself and subjects remain stuck in loops of anxiety,
dependence, fear, evaluation, and categorization. One cannot imagine
oneself into a different form of life, or plan it out. Connecting with
other forms of life entails entanglement with transformative capacities
and the values, penchants, and relations that go along with them. These
other affective worlds are always in the making in the cracks of Empire:
people are inventing and recovering ways of living and relating that are
joyful and transformative, through which they are exploring new
capacities together.
Freedom
Freedom means finding the transformative potential in our own situations
and relationships. This is very different from conventional, Western,
patriarchal definitions of freedom, which tend to conceive it as a state
of being uninhibited, unaffected, unhindered. This “free” individual of
Empire is a form of subjection invented by capitalism and the state,
enclosing us in a trap of market-mediated choices, contracts, and the
refinement of our individual preferences. From the relational
perspective we are advocating, freedom cannot be an escape from all
connections and relations, or any destination; it can only mean finding
room to move in the present. Finding the wiggle-room of freedom is
joyful: a collective increase in capacity to work on relationships. It
is in this sense that we argue that friendship and kinship are the basis
of freedom: intimate, durable, fierce bonds with others that undo us,
remake us, and create new capacities together.
Ideology
In the broad sense that we use it here, ideology means having a
pre-existing set of answers for political questions. This can be a
capitalist ideology that sees everything in terms of individual
preferences and self-interest; or a Marxist ideology that evaluates
everything in terms of whether or not it will lead to a workers’
revolution; or any other perspective that uses a fixed system of thought
to evaluate and manage encounters. By sorting unfolding events into
categories, everything becomes recognizable and thus one is closed off
from the capacity to be affected intensely and transformed. To be
transformed by an encounter, in contrast, is to be affected in a way
that is disorienting and undoes some of the habits, categories, and
perceptions enabled by ideology. To undo ideology requires a kind of
thinking-feeling that is relatively open and vulnerable.
Joy
From Spinoza, joy means an increase in a body’s capacity to affect and
be affected. It means becoming capable of feeling or doing something
new; it is not just a subjective feeling, but a real event that takes
place. In this sense it is different from happiness, which is one of
many potential ways a body might turn joy into a subjective experience.
This increase in capacity is a process of transformation, and it might
feel scary, painful, and exhilarating, but it will always be more than
just the emotions one feels about it. It is the growth of shared power
to do, feel, and think more.
Militancy
We want to revalue militancy as fierce conviction in which struggle and
care, fierceness and tenderness, go hand in hand. This emergent
militancy is enabled by supportive and transformative relationships,
which undo the stultifying forms of subjection inculcated by Empire.
This is different from the militancy associated with strains of
Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and other currents that, historically, have
been criticized for machismo, coldness, and vanguardism. At the same
time, there are nascent tendencies of joyful militancy everywhere,
including movements associated with rigidity. As something that comes
out of and depends on relationships, joyful militancy is not a fixed
perspective or an ideal to aspire to, but a lived process of
transformative struggle.
Morality
Morality is the fixing of a division between good and evil that is
divorced from the the intense uniqueness or singularity of situations,
and the potentials therein. As such, it is a form of subjection that
divorces us from our ability to be responsive to changing conditions,
offering up rigid divisions between good and evil. We focus in
particular on the rise of a liberal morality inherited from
Christianity, which upholds the status quo and constantly regulates and
pathologizes resistance and otherness. We suggest that an anti-liberal,
radical morality has grown in reaction, attempting to turn the tables by
pathologizing Empire and rooting out any form of complicity with it.
This is a poisonous trap: anti-liberal morality purports to be against
Empire, but it smuggles in penchants for guilt, shame, and
self-righteousness, leading to new forms of radical policing and
regulation in radical movements and spaces.
Passive
Much of the time, bodies undergo joy and sadness passively: we are
always being affected by forces to which we are not attuned. To be
affected passively is to undergo waves of joy and sadness (passions)
without being able to participate in the process. One might experience a
surge of joy and then suddenly lose the connection to those forces,
without having much of a sense of what made the surge possible, or what
led to its end. Sadness (the reduction of capacities) is always passive,
but bodies can become active in and through joy.
Radical monopoly
Radical monopoly is Ivan Illich’s term to get at the ways that modern
institutions and infrastructures—from schools to courts to hospitals to
highways—have made us dependent on them by monopolizing life and forcing
out alternatives. In so-called “developed” countries in particular, the
growth of modern institutions and industrial tools have created a form
of life that is increasingly dependent on expert knowledge and
industrial production. Through these monopolies, the skills, practices,
and relationships that sustained grassroots, convivial forms of dying
have been subjugated and, in some cases, completely annihilated. We take
this a bit further by arguing that contemporary societies of control
tend increasingly towards an affective monopoly, suffusing our habits,
desires, and tendencies through perpetual surveillance, stimulation, and
individualization.
Sadness
Sadness is the reduction of one’s capacity to affect and be affected. It
is not necessarily about feeling unhappy or despairing, but about the
ways that a body loses capacities, becoming more closed-off or
inhibited. Because we found it is so easily conflated with sorrow, we
tend to use words like stifling, stultifying, depleting, deadening, and
numbing to get at the affections of sadness. Sadness can never be
escaped or avoided completely; all things wax, wane, and change.
Subjection
Subjection gets at the ways that power does not merely oppress its
subjects from above, but composes and creates them. People are not
simply being tricked into participating in Empire’s stifling forms of
life, nor are we “choosing” to do so, as if we could simply opt out. On
the contrary, under certain sets of conditions, people can be made to
desire fascism, repression, and violence even if these forces are
killing them. This form of power cannot simply be opposed because it is
the condition of our existence; it is part of who we are and what we
want, and our habits and pleasures have been shaped by it. For example,
the promise of happiness through consumption can make us chase after
experiences or objects that deplete us even though they are pleasurable,
closing off our capacity to be affected otherwise. In a different way,
social media trains its subjects into perpetual performance of an online
identity, and the anxious management of our profiles closes us off from
other forms of connection. Rigid radicalism induces a hypervigilant
search for mistakes and flaws, stifling the capacity for
experimentation. None of these modes of subjection dictate how exactly
subjects will behave; instead they generate tendencies or attractor
points which pull subjects into predictable, stultifying orbits.
Resisting or transforming these systems is never straightforward,
because it means resisting and transforming one’s own habits and
desires. It means surprising both the structure and oneself with
something unexpected, new, and enabling.
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[*] BIPOC is an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. We
understand these not as ethnic categories or essentialist identities,
but complex political categories forged in struggles against white
supremacy and settler colonialism. For instance, the creation of
BIPOC-specific spaces or “caucuses” within various struggles has created
opportunities for understanding how racism or whiteness is playing out,
and how it can be confronted effectively.
[†] ISIL stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, often used
interchangeably with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
[‡] Note: when we interviewed Silvia Federici, we were still using the
phrase “sad militancy” in place of “rigid radicalism.” The original
terminology is retained throughout.
[1] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley:
Crossing Press, 1984), 4.
[2] Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Seattle: Rebel Press, 2001), 26.
[3] Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xi–xiv.
[4] The concept of the “public secret” originated with situationism, and
we borrow it from the Institute of Precarious Consciousness, in their
suggestion that anxiety is a public secret of contemporary capitalism.
See Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “Anxiety, Affective
Struggle, and Precarity Consciousness-Raising,” Interface 6/2 (2014),
271–300.
[5] Alfredo M. Bonanno, Armed Joy (London: Elephant Editions, 1998),
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy.
[6] See, for instance: John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking
Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, 2nd Revised Edition (London:
Pluto Press, 2005), 19-42; The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends
216-219.
[7] The concept of sad militancy comes to us from Michel Foucault and
Colectivo Situaciones. See Foucault, “Preface”; Colectivo Situaciones,
“Something More on Research Militancy: Footnotes on Procedures and
(In)Decisions,” in Constituent Imagination, ed. Erika Biddle and
Stevphen Shukaitis (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 73–93.
[8] Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy,” in
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),
ix–xv.
[9] Zainab Amadahy, “Protest Culture: How’s It Working for Us?,”
Rabble.ca, July 20, 2010,
http://rabble.ca/news/2010/07/protest-culture-how%E2%80%99s-it-working-us.
[10] This phrase is often attributed to Frederic Jameson who wrote
“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world
than to imagine the end of capitalism.” See Frederic Jameson, “Future
City,” New Left Review 21 (2003), 77.
[11] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 38.
[12] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1984),
53.
[13] “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons,” in The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, by Fred Moten and Stefano
Harney (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 10.
http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf.
[14] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007), 61.
[15] Dean Spade, “On Normal Life,” interview by Natalie Oswin, Society
and Space (January 2014), http://societyandspace.org/2014/01/15/on-6/.
[16] “Joy—Definition of Joy in English,” Oxford English Dictionary
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016),
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/joy.
[17] Rebecca Solnit, “We Could Be Heroes,” EMMA Talks, Vancouver,
February 17, 2016. http://emmatalks.org/session/rebecca-solnit/.
[18] Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010), 192.
[19] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Indict the System: Indigenous & Black
Connected Resistance,” LeanneSimpson.ca,
http://leannesimpson.ca/indict-the-system-indigenous-black-connected-resistance/
(accessed November 28, 2014).
[20] Our interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of joy comes from many
sources, but one of the most helpful is Mary Zournazi’s interview with
the affect theorist Brian Massumi, in which he distinguishes joy from
happiness. See Mary Zournazi, “Navigating Movements: A Conversation with
Brian Massumi,” in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, by Mary Zournazi
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 241-242.
[21] Gustavo Esteva, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery,
email, April 26, 2014.
[22] Silvia Federici, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery,
telephone, January 18, 2016.
[23] Lorde, Sister Outsider, 57.
[24] adrienne maree brown, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla
bergman, email, November 11, 2015.
[25] This reading of Deleuze is indebted to conversations with Kim Smith
and the reading she has developed of Susan Ruddick. See Susan Ruddick,
“The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the Work of Negri and Deleuze,”
Theory, Culture & Society 27/4 (2010), 21–45.
[26] Bædan, “The Anti-Social Turn,” Bædan 1: Journal of Queer Nihilism
(August 2012), 186.
[27] This notion of wisdom is drawn from Claire Carlisle’s helpful
explanation of Spinozan wisdom as something akin to “emotional
intelligence.” See Claire Carlisle, “Spinoza, Part 7: On the Ethics of
the Self,” The Guardian, March 21, 2011,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/21/spinoza-ethics-of-the-self.
[28] Marina Sitrin, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman,
email, February 4, 2016.
[29] “Militant,” Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Militant&oldid=754366474
(accessed December 12, 2016).
[30] Melanie Matining, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery,
in person, May 6, 2014.
[31] Jackie Wang, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender and the Politics of
Safety,” LIES Journal 1 (2012), 13.
[32] Idem, 10.
[33] Glen Coulthard, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, in
person, March 16, 2016.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Kiera L. Ladner and Leanne Simpson, eds., This Is an Honour Song:
Twenty Years since the Blockades (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010), 1.
[36] Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight
against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 178.
[37] Sebastián Touza, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman,
email, February 2, 2016.
[38] Sebastián Touza, “Antipedagogies for Liberation Politics,
Consensual Democracy and Post-Intellectual Interventions” (PhD
dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2008), 136–7.
https://www.academia.edu/544417/Antipedagogies_for_liberation_politics_consensual_democracy_and_post-intellectual_interventions.
[39] For a fuller discussion of these dynamics, see Marina Sitrin,
Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (London:
Zed Books, 2012).
[40] Margaret Killjoy, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery,
email, March 8, 2014.
[41] Anonymous, “Robot Seals as Counter-Insurgency: Friendship and Power
from Aristotle to Tiqqun,” Human Strike,
https://humanstrike.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/robot-seals-as-counter-insurgency-friendship-and-power-from-aristotle-to-tiqqun/
(accessed August 27, 2013).
[42] brown, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[43] Idem, 163.
[44] “Freedom—Definition of Freedom in English,” Oxford English
Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/freedom.
[45] Douglas Harper, “Free (Adj.),” Online Etymology Dictionary,
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=free (accessed November 30,
2016).
[46] Ibid.
[47] Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, eds., Word Histories
and Mysteries: From Abracadabra to Zeus (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2004), 103.
[48] Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, trans. Robert Hurley (South
Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2015), 127.
[49] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008), Chapter
XIII, Of the Natural Condition of Mankind.
[50] This short account of the Age of Reason is drawn primarily from
Silvia Federici. See Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body
and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 133–62.
[51] Some books we have found helpful include Jane Bennett, Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010); Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans.
Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992); Moira Gatens, ed., Feminist
Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 2009); Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of
Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991); Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, trans. Alexander R.
Galloway and Jason E. Smith (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010).
[52] Our reading of Spinoza is drawn primarily from Deleuze and those he
has influenced. For helpful introductions to this lineage, see Gilles
Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect” (Lecture, Cours
Vincennes, Paris, 1978),
https://www.gold.ac.uk/media/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf; Michael Hardt,
“The Power to Be Affected,” International Journal of Politics, Culture,
and Society 28/3 (September 1, 2015), 215–22; Brian Massumi, Politics of
Affect (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).
[53] “Ethics—Definition of Ethics in English,” Oxford English Dictionary
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016),
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ethics.
[54] Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect.”
[55] This anecdote is based on conversations and exchanges with Kim
Smith.
[56] Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2009), 32.
[57] Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene,
Chthulucene.”
[58] Ivan Illich to Madhu Suri Prakash, “Friendship,” n.d.
[59] This is drawn from Anonymous, “Robot Seals as Counter-Insurgency.”
[60] Coulthard, Interview with Glen Coulthard.
[61] See for instance Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World
Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books,
2014); Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White
Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Colour Organizing,” in The Color of
Violence: The Incite! Anthology, INCITE! Women of Colour Against
Violence, eds., (Oakland: South End Press, 2006), 66–73; Andrea Smith,
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 2010); Federici, Caliban and the Witch.
[62] Silvia Federici, “Preoccupying: Silvia Federici,” interview by
Occupied Times, October 25, 2014, http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=13482.
[63] Dean Spade, “For Lovers and Fighters,” in We Don’t Need Another
Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, ed. Melody
Berger (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2006), 28–39,
http://www.makezine.enoughenough.org/newpoly2.html.
[64] bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 249.
[65] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “I Am Not a Nation-State,” Indigenous
Nationhood Movement, November 6, 2013,
http://nationsrising.org/i-am-not-a-nation-state/.
[66] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla
bergman, email, November 2, 2015.
[67] Raúl Zibechi, Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin
American Social Movements, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2012),
39.
[68] Idem, 41.
[69] Silvia Federici, “Permanent Reproductive Crisis: An Interview with
Silvia Federici,” interview by Marina Vishmidt, July 3, 2013,
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici.
[70] Mia Mingus, “On Collaboration: Starting With Each Other,” Leaving
Evidence, August 3, 2012,
https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/on-collaboration-starting-with-each-other/.
[71] Gustav Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader,
ed. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 214.
[72] Idem, 90.
[73] Idem, 101.
[74] Idem, 91.
[75] scott crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the
Common Ground Collective, 2nd ed. (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 199.
[76] Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the
Newest Social Movements (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005), 127.
[77] Richard J. F. Day, “From Hegemony to Affinity,” Cultural Studies
18/5 (2004), 716–48.
[78] Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Ya Basta!: Ten Years of the
Zapatista Uprising, ed. Ziga Vodovnik, (Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 77.
[79] Gloria Anzaldúa, “(Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces,” in This
Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, Gloria Anzaldúa
and AnaLouise Keating, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3.
[80] Zainab Amadahy, “Community, ‘Relationship Framework’ and
Implications for Activism,” Rabble.ca, July 13, 2010,
http://rabble.ca/news/2010/07/community-%E2%80%98relationship-framework%E2%80%99-and-implications-activism.
[81] Coulthard, Interview by.
[82] Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial
Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press,
2014), 31.
[83] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[84] Leanne Simpson, Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg
Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring
Press, 2011), 32.
[85] Luam Kidane and Jarrett Martineau, “Building Connections across
Decolonization Struggles,” ROAR, October 29, 2013,
https://roarmag.org/essays/african-indigenous-struggle-decolonization/.
[86] Harsha Walia, “Decolonizing Together: Moving beyond a Politics of
Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization,” Briarpatch, January 1,
2012,
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/decolonizing-together.
[87] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[88] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All
and None, trans. Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora Publishing, 2003), 42.
[89] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[90] Mingus, “On Collaboration.”
[91] Simpson, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[92] Ursula LeGuin, “Ursula K Le Guin’s Speech at National Book Awards:
‘Books Aren’t Just Commodities,’” The Guardian, November 20, 2014,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech.
[93] scott crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the
Common Ground Collective, 2nd ed. (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 173.
[94] adrienne maree brown, “That Would Be Enough,”
adriennemareebrown.net, September 6, 2016,
http://adriennemareebrown.net/2016/09/06/that-would-be-enough/.
[95] VOID Network, “VOID Network on the December 2008 Insurrection in
Greece,” B.A.S.T.A.R.D. Conference, University of California, Berkeley,
March 14, 2010,
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/03/18/18641710.php.
[96] Many works within this current remain untranslated into English;
however, there are a few English sources. In particular, we learned a
lot from Sebastian Touza’s PhD dissertation and our interview with him.
See Colectivo Situaciones, 19&20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism,
trans. Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza (New York: Minor Compositions,
2012); Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect”; Marta Malo de
Molina, “Common Notions, Part 1: Workers-Inquiry, Co-Research,
Consciousness-Raising,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural
Policies, April 2004, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en; Marta
Malo de Molina:, “Common Notions, Part 2: Institutional Analysis,
Participatory Action-Research, Militant Research,” European Institute
for Progressive Cultural Policies, April 2004,
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/malo/en; Touza, “Antipedagogies for
Liberation Politics, Consensual Democracy and Post-Intellectual
Interventions”; Touza, Interview with Sebastián Touza.
[97] Touza, “Antipedagogies for Liberation Politics, Consensual
Democracy and Post-Intellectual Interventions,” 210.
[98] Nora Samaran, “On Gaslighting,” Dating Tips for the Feminist Man,
June 28, 2016, https://norasamaran.com/2016/06/28/on-gaslighting/.
[99] Matt Hern, “The Promise of Deschooling,” Social Anarchism 25
(1998),
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display_printable/130.
[100] Toby Rollo, “Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and
the Figure of the Child,” Settler Colonial Studies (June 2016), 1–20.
[101] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October
59 (1992), 3–7.
[102] Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “We Are All Very Anxious,”
WeArePlanC.org, April 4, 2014,
http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/.
[103] Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions, 37.
[104] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row,
1973), 12.
[105] Our readings and understandings of Illich's work, and our
understanding of conviviality in particular, is indebted to
conversations with friends who either knew Illich personally or worked
closely with his ideas, including Gustavo Esteva, Madhu Suri Prakash,
Dan Grego, Dana L. Stuchul and Matt Hern.
[106] Quoted in The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 232–3.
[107] Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in
Argentina (Oakland: AK Press, 2006); Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions.
[108] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary
Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 2.
[109] Idem, 7.
[110] Leanne Simpson, “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with
Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson,” Yes! Magazine, March 5, 2013,
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson.
[111] Quoted in Tony Manno, “Unsurrendered,” Yes! Magazine, 2015,
http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=b24e304ce1944493879cba028607dfc7.
[112] INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, “INCITE! Critical
Resistance Statement,” 2001,
http://www.incite-national.org/page/incite-critical-resistance-statement.
[113] Rachel Zellars and Naava Smolash, “If Black Women Were Free: Part
1,” Briarpatch, August 16, 2016,
http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/if-black-women-were-free.
[114] Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin, October 17,
2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/.
[115] Creative Interventions, “Toolkit,” CreativeInterventions.org,
http://www.creative-interventions.org/tools/toolkit/ (accessed December
1, 2016).
[116] Quoted in carla bergman and Corine Brown, Common Notions: Handbook
Not Required, 2015.
[117] Gustavo Esteva, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery,
video, 2012.
[118] Kelsey Cham C., Nick Montgomery, and carla bergman, interview by
carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, October 26, 2013.
[119] Marina Sitrin, “Occupy Trust: The Role of Emotion in the New
Movements,” Cultural Anthropology (February 2013),
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/75-occupy-trust-the-role-of-emotion-in-the-new-movements.
[120] Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism:
Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London: Zed Books, 1998), 91.
[121] Day, Gramsci Is Dead, 200.
[122] Zainab Amadahy, Wielding the Force: The Science of Social Justice,
Smashwords edition (Zainab Amadahy, 2013), 36.
[123] Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism, 89.
[124] Amadahy, Wielding the Force, 149.
[125] Emma Goldman, “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism,” in Red Emma Speaks:
An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst: Humanity Books,
1998), 157.
[126] Chris Dixon, “For the Long Haul,” Briarpatch Magazine, June 21,
2016, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/for-the-long-haul.
[127] We first encountered the concept of “public secret” as a way of
getting at the affect of anxiety today, described by the Institute for
Precarious Consciousness. Earlier uses can be traced to the work of Ken
Knabb (which credits the concept to Marx) and his curation of
Situationist writing, as well as Jean-Pierre Voyer’s reading of Reich.
See Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “Movement
Internationalism(s),” Interface 6/2; Jean-Pierre Voyer, “Wilhelm Reich:
How To Use,” in Public Secrets, trans. Ken Knabb (Bureau of Public
Secrets, 1997), http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/reich.htm; Jean-Pierre
Voyer to Ken Knabb, “Discretion Is the Better Part of Value,” April 20,
1973, http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/Reich.add.htm.
[128] This was suggested to us by Richard Day.
[129] brown, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.
[130] Amador Fernández-Savater, “Reopening the Revolutionary Question,”
ROAR Magazine 0 (December 2015).
[131] Federici, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.
[132] Touza, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.
[133] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 32.
[134] Foucault, “Preface.”
[135] Cited in Ashanti Alston, “An Interview with Ashanti Alston,”
interview by Team Colours, June 6, 2008,
https://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/an-interview-with-ashanti-alston/.
[136] Thoburn develops his conception of a “militant diagram” through a
reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and we have found it useful in thinking
about rigid radicalism as an affective tendency that is irreducible to
the gestures, habits, practices, and statements that are simultaneously
its fuel and its discharge. See Nicholas Thoburn, “Weatherman, the
Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” New Formations
68/1 (2010), 125–42.
[137] Colectivo Situaciones, “Something More on Research Militancy:
Footnotes and Procedures and (In)Decisions,” 5.
[138] Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of
Political Passion,” 129; Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My
Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007),
265–300.
[139] Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, eds., Sing a Battle
Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the
Weather Underground 1970-1974 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 18.
[140] Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2009), 154.
[141] Esteva, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[142] Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of
Political Passion,” 134.
[143] Esteva, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[144] Sitrin, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[145] Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970),
54.
[146] amory starr, “Grumpywarriorcool: What Makes Our Movements White?,”
in Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (Oakland: AK
Press, 2006), 379.
[147] Idem, 383.
[148] crow, Black Flags and Windmills, 81.
[149] Alston, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[150] Richard J. F. Day, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman,
phone, March 18, 2014.
[151] Alston, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[152] CrimethInc., “Against Ideology?,” CrimethInc.com, 2010,
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/ideology.php.
[153] Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of
Ethics (Oxon: Routledge, 1947), 235.
[154] See Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, trans.
Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson, revised edition (New York, Cambridge,
MA: Zone Books, 1998); Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 21–60.
[155] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 33.
[156] Idem, 36.
[157] Quoted by Maya Angelou in Malcolm X, Malcolm X: An Historical
Reader, ed. James L. Conyers and Andrew P. Smallwood (Durham: Carolina
Academic Press, 2008), 181.
[158] Kelsey Cham C., “Radical Language in the Mainstream,” Perspectives
on Anarchist Theory 29 (2016), 122–3.
[159] Asam Ahmad, “A Note on Call-Out Culture,” Briarpatch, March 2,
2015,
http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture.
[160] Ngọc Loan Trần, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each
Other Accountable,” Black Girl Dangerous, December 18, 2013,
http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/12/calling-less-disposable-way-holding-accountable/.
[161] Ibid.
[162] Chris Crass, “White Supremacy Cannot Have Our People: For a
Working Class Orientation at the Heart of White Anti-Racist Organizing,”
Medium, July 28, 2016,
https://medium.com/@chriscrass/white-supremacy-cannot-have-our-people-21e87d2b268a.
[163] Ibid.
[164] Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Scribner, 1999),
137.
[165] Killjoy, Interview with Margaret Killjoy.
[166] Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You.”
[167] Day, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[168] Mik Turje, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, March
4, 2014.
[169] Walidah Imarisha, Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime,
Prison, and Redemption (Oakland: AK Press, 2016), 113–15.
[170] Walidah Imarisha, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman,
email, December 22, 2015.
[171] Federici, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[172] John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning
of Revolution Today, 2nd Revised Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2005),
215.
[173] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[174] This turn of phrase comes to us from Stevphen Shukaitis’s
wonderful book Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the
Revolutions of Everyday Life (New York: Autonomedia, 2009), 141–2,
http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ImaginalMachines-web.pdf.
[175] This idea is paraphrased from Lauren Berlant and her conception of
“cruel optimism,” a relation in which our attachments become obstacles
to our flourishing. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011).
[176] Federici, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.
[177] Zainab Amadahy, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman,
January 15, 2016.
[178] Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,”
JoFreeman.com, n.d., http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.
[179] Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Dam,” (Boston: New England Free
Press, 1969).
[180] See Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Ms. Magazine,
July 1973.
[181] Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet,” Social Text
9/10 (1984), 338–46.
[182] See Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State
Forces, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2010); Zibechi,
Territories in Resistance.
[183] Silvia Federici, “Losing the sense that we can do something is the
worst thing that can happen,” interview by Candida Hadley, Halifax Media
Co-op, November 5, 2013,
http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/audio/losing-sense-we-can-do-something-worst-thing-can-h/19601.