Joyful Militancy - book review
Nick Montgomery and carla bergman wrote a book, Joyful Militancy: Building thriving resistance in toxic times, that talks to us about a rigid radicalism that is seeping through our movements in the very air of the cultures of our groups and our inner worlds as activists and organisers. It is within us, doing the work of Empire, constraining, limiting and punishing us. They talk about how spaces for collective transformation are already emerging and operating - 'We are already otherwise'! The otherwise they refer to is a feeling and practice of joyful militancy - a process of movement itself, of creativity and experimentation, of collective power. They are not trying to offer a new template (which can then be rigidly applied) but a series of questions and concepts for movement organisers to explore and play with. In this blog, I want to briefly introduce a couple of the concepts they work with as they are informing my work and thinking and I think are useful!
What has this all got to do with land (in)justice? In my research, I am exploring not only histories but also how movements that seek to repair the future go about doing so. Some of the concepts in this book might be useful to the land justice movement / groups and organisations working towards land justice in Britain today.
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Rigid Radicalism: In this form, radicalism is an ideal that is sought. Everything else fails to live up to it, perpetuating a constant critique and policing of behaviour and thought. It crushes the transformative potential of radical spaces by creating a series of 'shoulds', morals, orders, rules where one is never radical enough. It is important to note that rigid radicalism isn't just something done over there by those people - we all participate in it - it is like a gas in the air that permeates everything.
Joyful Militancy: Joy - the first part of this concept, emerges from Spinozan understanding - 'it is not an emotion but an increase in one's power to affect and be affected'. The authors are also keen to stress that joy and happiness are not synonymous - joy can involve happiness but also a range of other emotions too. Militancy is also presented as a possibly complicated concept with associations of machismo / militarism. In the sense the authors use it here, militancy means 'combativeness and a willingness to fight, but fighting might look like a lot of different things'. This can include struggle against internalised shame, fierce care and support of a friend, courage to sit with trauma, a quiet act of sabotage, the willingness to take a risk.
Empire: This term is used to describe 'the organised destruction under which we live'. It encompasses the systems and structures that make everything up for sale, backed by violence, monopolising all fields of life. The goal of movement work is to undo Empire in all its forms whether it is within ourselves, in our groups, in the world. Something I like about these authors' approach is that this work of 'undoing' is already in motion - they argue that there are cracks everywhere in which people are already emerging new ways of being, of transforming, of challenging. We don't have to start over, its already glimmering in the margins and cracks... A Leonard Cohen quote coming to mind: 'There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in'.
Affect: Joyful militancy is about ‘an increase in one's power to affect and be affected’ - so trying to understand how these authors use ‘affect’ is important. This too emerges out of Spinoza’s philosophy. ‘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’.
Friendship: ‘Empire works in part by constantly attenuating and poisoning relationships’. (p81) Tending to relationships, defending each other, becoming dangerous together sees friendship as a relational freedom and the source of collective power. The authors quote Ivan Illich who wrote ‘Friendship will be the soil from which a new politics will emerge’. This is friendship not in the neoliberal/heteronormative sense of a category of relation that is somehow less than, denoted by the word that often preceeds it ‘just’. It is about a radical kind of kinship, transformative, powerful. The relationships through which joyful militancy can happen, through which we can become joyfully militant. Montgomery and bergman also reflect that ‘working on relationships also means the capacity to dissolve and sever them and to block those which are harmful’. (p120) Being able to discern the difference between radical transformative friendship and those which cause harm and need to be dissolved becomes the work of a relational ethics - in process, emergent, discerning.
Common Notions: Part of the analysis offered by these authors is that rigid radicalism tends to universalise, demand ideology and moral codes and sets rules about what is right and wrong in many arenas. An alternative to these rules and codes and orders is offered in the form of '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'. Common notions seem to be much more about values that orientate our response to inevitable changing and emergent surroundings.
