They talk about how militant joy, art, and practices that empower us all to thrive can make our movements stronger and healthier. The text is full of nuance and offers many pathways for how we can look at and work through these tendencies within ourselves, our spaces and our communities.
They talk about the (potential) influences that schooling, religion, hierarchy, and empire has on our lives and how it can even seep into our organizing. This episode of the Solecast I chat with Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery about their new(ish) book out on AK Press, “Joyful Militancy.” This book is a critical examination of the toxicity that seems to be so common within activist subculture. Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.Revolutionary hip-hop artist and podcaster Sole returns with a new podcast episode, this time, an interview with the authors o Joyful Militancy, off of AK Press. But these insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless, only that friendship is a terrain of struggle.
Under neoliberal friendship, we don't have each other's backs, and our livesĪren't tangled up together. 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. The algorithms of Facebook and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button. We become friends with those who are already like us, and we keep each other comfortable rather than becoming different and more capable together.
Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. “Maybe the concept of friendship is already too colonized by liberalism and capitalism. Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times it means surprising both the structure and oneself with something unexpected, new, and enabling.” resisting or transforming these systems is never straightforward, because it means resisting and transforming one’s own habits and desires. 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. rigid radicalism induces a hypervigilant search for mistakes and flaws, stifling the capacity for experimentation. 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 of from other forms of connection. “The promise of happiness through consumption can make us chase after experiences or objects that deplete us even though they are pleasurable, closing of our capacity to be affected otherwise.
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