Joyful Militancy Quotes

“Gaslighting can be subtle and unintentional, but as feminist writer Nora Samaran explains, it is particularly insidious because it undermines people's trust in their own capacities:
"If you think of the power, the strength, the capacity to effect change that women who trust themselves are capable of, what we are losing when we doubt ourselves is an indomitable force for social change that is significant and therefore, to some, frightening. In other words, our capacity to know ourselves is immensely powerful."
All forms of oppression seem to have this tendency: racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, ageism, colonization, and other systems of oppression contort people's insights, experiences, and differences into weaknesses or deny them outright. For this reason, the emergence of trust can be a powerful weapon, which is being recovered all the time through struggle.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“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. The algorithms of Facebook and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button. 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. Under neoliberal friendship, we don't have each other's backs, and our lives
aren't tangled up together. But these insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless, only that friendship is a terrain of struggle. Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“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. 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. rigid radicalism induces a hypervigilant search for mistakes and flaws, stifling the capacity for experimentation. 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. resisting or transforming these systems is never straightforward, because it means resisting and transforming one’s own habits and desires. it means surprising both the structure and oneself with something unexpected, new, and enabling.”
― Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Here we want to return to the dynamic space beyond fixed norms on the one hand, and “anything goes” relativism on the other. Outside this false dichotomy is the domain of relationships that are alive, responsive, and make people capable of new things together, without imposing this on everyone else. It is in this space where values like openness, curiosity, trust, and responsibility can really flourish, not as fixed ways of being to be applied everywhere but as ways of relating that can only be kept alive by cultivating careful, selective, and fierce boundaries. For joy to flourish, it needs sharp edges.”
― Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“When rigidity and suspicion take over, joy dies out.”
― Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Responsibility in this sense is not a burden but something that actually enhances our life experience. The word literally means “ability to respond.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Imarisha’s words reveal the capacity to hold on to intensity and ambivalence, without parsing it into a binary between “feeling good” and “feeling bad,” or setting optimism against pessimism. To be capable of holding all of this—of wins attached to losses, and joys attached to sorrows—is fundamentally about being affected. It is about inhabiting a world of uncertainty and complexity, about feeling and participating in emergent and collective powers. Joy.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“At times, my most urgent desire is to feel untroubled. Thank you for divesting me from it over and over.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“...no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing “this shit down” until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“What happens when politics becomes something a person *has*, rather than something people *do together* as a shared practice?”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Is it possible to be militant about creativity and care? Can militancy be based on something that is responsive and relationship-based? Can people be militant about joy?”
― Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Whereas morality asks and answers the question: “what should one do?” a Spinozan ethics asks: “what is one capable of?”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Instead, radical monopoly gets at the way that Empire monopolizes life itself: how people relate to each other, how they get around, how they get their sustenance, and the whole texture of everyday life.”
― Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“From a certain perspective, it can be depressing to hear about places where the social fabric is much stronger, where there are deep traditions of mutual aid, or where struggles against Empire are visible, widespread, & intense. It can activate a feeling around us that people are too flawed, too complacent, or that our own worlds are lacking something...”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times