Notes on Joyful Militancy
Dear reader,
I plan to move homes from substack, but till then, shall cross-post.
Dear reader,
Once upon a time, around five years ago methinks, I came across the review of a book whose words seem to jump off the screen straight into my zehn. As was and is the ways of my online meanderings, I knew then I would come back and dwell on the review, get the book, read it, revel in it, and, all those new link resolutions were made, and I moved to the other click. (I can almost see B. raise his brows, placarding between them, bookmark, bookmark.) After some time, when I tried to retrace my path, I found no breadcrumbs, the ether had licked them up clean. I tried all the left sites, Jacobin, New Left Review, and what nots, but could not find this review, and I had forgotten the name of the book. The years passed.
A couple of weeks ago, I came across one of those context-less quotes shared by someone in Instagram, and it promptly jumped off the screen straight into my zehn. (I still don't get the idea of pulling out quotes from a book without context and making a picture out of it, but that's another rant.) I whooped - it was the book; cue yaadon ki baraat soundtrack, I could have recognised those words anywhere, and when I saw the cover (I mean, look at that cover -- it says so much) I knew the search was complete.
The book is 'Joyful Militancy', building thriving resistance in toxic times by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman. It is one of those books I made highlights of extensively, because every now and then there would be a paragraph that I would find myself agreeing with, and wanting to discuss with others.
The authors start by acknowledging the general mood of despair around, "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." There is a sense of inevitability about capitalism; if not this then what? A lot of the novels I read recently too adopt what I started to think of as the 'capitalism, whattodo shrug' (a longer letter coming soon about these novels). The plots of these books are as diverse as they are, revolving around the tyranny of social media performativity, class struggles, and the avarice of billionnaires, but underlying all of them is this sense of, yes, all this is bad, but 'capitalism whattodo shrug'.
Obviously, the authors of Joyful Militancy and those they write about, have gone beyond the 'capitalism whattodo shrug', and here, they introduce some concepts that occur through the book. If ever someday, there is that promised book club, I hope each of these terms would have their own discussion sessions.
First is the idea of joy. The authors make a distinction between joy and happiness, which I can't go into in detail, for you must read the book, so that we can discuss in the someday book club. Here's a glimpse though, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, whom the authors quote, "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 well-being... 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." That last phrase, the wall-to-wall carpeting of the psyche is something I wanted to underline repeatedly, which the blasted screen would not give me the satisfaction of. It is something people have spoken about in different ways, in different contexts that it almost feels like a banal observation. Even though you have 1.5 million followers, why, like Gulzar said, 'itne log hain, phir tanha kyon ho'? When you can order anything you want at the click of a button, why do you scroll endlessly, and then throw the phone away, irritated?
I have thought of it as missing an incalculable friction -- we need that friction to feel that we are alive; like when you struggle with a paragraph, and when you hit on that phrasing, it comes as this kick; something joyful. When you take a stand, on the street, in your home, in your workplace, and there's that moment of transgression. When you sit with a friend you have known for years and they tease you about something silly. I could go on, but in all these interactions, you need to get out of that insulated room with wall-to-wall carpeting. The authors come up with different interpetations and examples to illustrate what they mean by joy, an active passion, a process of transformation, the erotic, and so on, and I found one word particularly of note, sentipensar, 'the conviction that you cannot think without feeling or feel without thinking'. Then the authors talk of militancy, which is usually associated with combative aggression, but they unpack its different layers, as an active, fertile and transformative process. The authors do not take the easy way of giving easy definitions to these terms, rather, they talk of different imaginations of that word, and what it could mean and stand for, and in doing so, also push for continuing that process.
The authors then speak of how the basis of any social movement is a sense of friendship and community, and the attendant prickly problems of trust and solidarity that accompany any such community space. For there is always the question of power, the location of people, their conditioning, and their own personal idiosyncracies. All of which is complicated by the context of capitalism and other oppressive structures such movements are embedded in. All these pressures could result in what the authors term 'rigid radicalism', where the rules of who is in and out become rigid, where the same processes that are being critiqued get reproduced, and unintentionally, the same relationships that made us sick get reproduced (paraphrasing a quote by Zainab Amadahy in the book).
Then comes the paragraph that every time does the zehn jump, "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 naive 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."
The authors term this phenomenon 'rigid radicalism', 'a fixed way of being, and a way of fixing'. Don't worry, there is no prescription of what to do about it; the authors are careful to not go down that route. There isn't a binary too -- for instance, 'calling in' is not framed as an opposite of 'calling out'. There isn't a senseless free for all approach to say whatever anyone wants, however they want, because oppressive structures are real. They also speak about their own fears -- even in writing this, they will be dismissed as too naive, too woo-woo, too oppressive, and add that this fear (performative? performing?) also imposes self-censorship. What I found valuable is that they share insights of different people involved in varied movements, and so there is a plurality of voices and ideas, people speak from their own experience, and there's an underlying texture of care, they do not speak in the language of accusing and punishing, rather more in the register of transformative justice.
I shall pause here, for I don't think I have yet absorbed all the ideas that come after to provide a summary or a key highlights sort of ending. I also think it makes more sense for you to engage with the material without any such preludes; you can then sift it from the lens of your own experiences. I also hope for a similar book in the Indian context. I shall leave you with these lines, which I wanted to underline again and again:
"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"