Joyful Militancy

This book is very close to my heart, and hits right home. I came across this book through a Joyful Militancy reading group organized last year by an online milieu I belong to (and deeply love, despite not meeting some of them yet). I wasn't able to keep up with their pace, so I decided to pause it and re-read it later last year. It took me quite a while to finish reading this, because I had to take some time to absorb and reflect on the discussions and ideas presented. It made me look inside myself so many times and ask: in what ways do I and the groups I belong to perpetuate rigid radicalism? In what ways are we hurting ourselves and each other? How can we heal together? How do we introduce more joy in our activism? How do we make flowers bloom in the cracks of empire?

I now understand why people who read this want to spread it like wildfire. Why people organize so many reading groups, why the discussions here become necessary questions and a lifetime search for answers in the movements I look up to.

I will update this review with a lot of quotes I highlighted from this book. There's so much to keep in mind, so much to unpack, so much to discuss.

I have more questions than answers, which I think is the goal of this book. I'm glad to seek for the answers everyday; after all, prefiguration is praxis. The joy is in the doing. The joy is my capacity to seek and feel and figure out and learn again-- together with those I love.

Anyone who has ever been involved in any kind of activism/organizing/leftist group can attest to the fact that those spaces can sometimes be incredibly rigid, unwelcoming, paranoid, and just depressing. This book is an attempt to ask why those spaces become that way and if there are better ways of organizing, better ways of trying to make the world better. I very much agree with the problems that they point out and the central ideas - That relationships are more important than ideology. That the everyday is crucial. That we need joy in what we are doing or we will fail. That we need to leave room for personal and collective transformation and not expect everyone to be exactly in the right place (as though we know what that is). If I were another type of person, I would probably give it another star. But I am at a place where I really want everything to be as plainly and succinctly stated as possible. I think it is my old age setting in. And I found myself skimming a lot of the repetitive and/or overly philosophical parts. (There was a lot of Spinoza.) Still, this is an important conversation to be having and worth a read.