I had a funny conversation with my Mum the other day, when I called her for our birthdays (hers is the day before mine, meaning she spent every one of her birthdays during my childhood baking cakes and preparing for children to crush cheezels into her carpet the next day). I was talking about my semi-recent embrace of anarchism and she congratulated me — "I'm glad it didn't take you another 20 years like it did for me".
I'd been reading Nick Montgomery and carla bergman's "Joyful Militancy", so anarchism was on my mind more than usual. They've absolutely captured — with their concept of "rigid radicalism" (sometimes referred to as "sad militancy" in other/earlier discussion, though they've turned away from that terminology) — one of the main things that blocked me from thinking of myself as "an Anarchist" (capital A). I've seen this on display in the Australia Greens, which is not really a radical organisation but has plenty of the bad habits seen in them. Indeed, Joyful Militancy's exploration of how endless factionalism, purity contests and "call outs" come to infest radical groups shows why it's likely to be worse in a liberal organisation that pretends to be radical.
I really appreciated this book. I said on Mastodon that is it "probably the most important book I'll read this decade". Whilst Alissa rightly pointed out that "Sand Talk" will probably take that title, "Joyful Militancy" is definitely going to stay with me, and I'm confident I'll read some or all of it again in the coming years. To be "joyful" in their sense is not (necessarily) to be "happy", but rather to be growing, looking outward, embracing new ideas and perspectives. I was thinking this morning that their ideas pair nicely with Rebecca Solnit's concept of "hope". Solnit's hope is not a passive wish for things to end well. For her, to hope is to believe that things can end well. Hope is fierce, and active.
Both joy and hope are best felt together with others. Another story I read this week was about a classic group of "sad militants", but has the seed of future joyful militancy. The FARC had 10,000 guerillas at the time of its historic truce with the Colombian government. Whatever the possible merits of their original rebellion, by the end FARC had devolved into a narco-gang, slowly losing a war with government forces. But for decades they had to feed thousands of fighters in the middle of the jungle. University researchers are now talking to former (?) FARC members about how they did it — the logistics, the menus, and also the social consequences. This article was really fascinating - as the FARC have been re-settled in urban areas, some of the more egalitarian aspects of "camp life" have devolved back to mainstream patriarchal arrangements, with the men who used to cook for their comrades now expecting their wives and sisters to cook for them. But there are also former fighters who are making an effort to retain the social worlds that brought them joy during their time in the jungles — communal meals, unique recipes, and cooking together. You don't have to want to be an armed insurrectionist to appreciate that.
My wife volunteers with Fare Share, an organisation that uses "surplus" food from restaurants and supermarkets to create meals for unhoused people and others living precarious lives — either directly as hot meals, or in food parcels for those who have a home to cook in. It's a great organisation and whilst one could quibble over some of the charities and major corporations Fare Share coordinates with, it provides community for those who volunteer together and food to people who need it, whilst putting to use food that otherwise probably would be added to landfill. The reason Fare Share needs to exist sucks, and should be countered energetically. In the meantime people are getting hot meals they otherwise wouldn't, AND other people are experiencing the joys of working together to feed people with fugitive food that has slipped out of the capitalist meat grinder.
The main and most important point of Joyful Militancy is really a re-statement of the idea of pre-figurative politics: that we make "the revolution" through how we go about every day. I was already thinking prior to COVID that I wanted to make more effort bringing people together in my life. The ongoing partial home detention of life in COVID times has simply reinforced this, especially whilst simultaneously reading about anarchist ideas and my grandmother's philosophy that one should constantly make friends of all ages so one will always be learning and never be lonely. Reflecting on my own experience, there's no doubting Montgomery and bergman's assertion that friends can and do radicalise each other (and of course, this can go in any direction: friends form white nationalist militias as well as Black Blocs). But capitalism ("Empire") pulls us apart. The majority of time I spend with friends in a planned way involves eating together, yes, but nearly always it's going to a restaurant or bar. We don't cook together or for each other, and this feels like a loss. And I don't mean the awkward middle class "dinner parties" beloved of 1970s cookbooks and weird English TV shows. I mean just ...getting together to eat, and talk, and live. I don't do that, and I'd like to.
It would be great if there was somewhere to go hang out with friendly people who have been thinking about this sort of thing for decades. Alas, it appears the Melbourne Anarchist Collective (MAC), which has a storied history and even owns its own building, has succumbed hard to "rigid radicalism". It seems a nasty split came to a head in 2019, and even without COVID the building is now either uninhabitable or has been sold — it's a bit unclear which. Something I did notice when reading an old news story about this though, is that MAC is/was a registered Association with Consumer Affairs Victoria. newCardigan did this a few years ago, and I've wondered a few times since whether it was the right move. CAV rules force certain processes upon organisations — like Office Bearers and elections for them — that can cause unnecessary tensions in small organisations. Indeed, it seems this is part of the story of the MAC. David Graeber once had a great story about the New York Direct Action Network (DAN) at the turn of the millenium:
DAN was not, technically, a group, but a decentralized network, operating on principles of direct democracy according to an elaborate, but strikingly effective, form of consensus process...DAN existed in a purely political space; it had no concrete resources, not even a significant treasury, to administer. Then one day someone gave DAN a car. It caused a minor, but ongoing, crisis. We soon discovered that legally, it is impossible for a decentralized network to own a car...Unless we were willing to incorporate ourselves as a nonprofit corporation (which would have required a complete reorganization and abandoning most of our egalitarian principles) the only expedient was to find a volunteer willing to claim to be the owner for legal purposes. But then that person was expected to pay all outstanding fines, insurance fees, provide written permission to allow others to drive out of state, and, of course, only he could retrieve the car if it were impounded. Before long the DAN car had become such a perennial problem that we simply abandoned it.
But presumably MAC registered for the same reason newCardigan did — as Graeber notes, anarchist collectives can't legally own anything, sign contracts, or pay and be paid bills. Just because you're an anarchist collective doesn't mean the organisations you have to interact with are as well. I've had the story of the DAN in my head for the last year, so to be honest it was kind of reassuring to read that the MAC chose to swallow the bitter pill and register with the authorities, just like we did at newCardigan.
It was my anarchist friends, of course, who realised we'd been building a proto-anarchist culture worker collective well before I accepted it. Perhaps I was scared of what that might mean. Would we scare off people who don't identify as even "political", let alone anything else? This too, is something Joyful Militancy has helped me be more confident about. We're not building a militant anarchist collective. We're building an affinity network for workers in cultural institutions who feel uneasy (or more) about working in colonial cultural institutions. We don't have to tell anyone we're radical, we just have to be radical. Politics, after all, is what you do.
All of which is to say, I read this great book, and I felt very seen. And also, I read this great book, and now I see a bunch of things that were right in front of my face. Sand Talk made me feel like I'd been allowed to glimpse some entirely new plane of reality. Joyful Militancy is quite different, but may well be no less influential. Sand Talk was entirely unfamiliar. Joyful Militancy is very familiar. But where Sand Talk showed me a way in, Joyful Militancy shows a way out.
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