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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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 146)

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 132)

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 125)

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 122)

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 109)

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 101)

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 84 - 85)

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 75)

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 75)

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 75)

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.22 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.

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 62)

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.

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.18 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.

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.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 59)