Chapter 4: Stifling Air, Burnout, Political Performance

Capitalism, colonialism and heteropatriarchy make us sick. Are our responses healing us? Are our actions generating wellbeing for others? Or are we unintentionally reproducing the kind of relationships that made us sick in the first place?

—Zainab Amadahy[125]

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.

—Emma Goldman[126]

Toxic contours

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. We can sense its emergence at certain times, when we feel the need to perform in certain ways, hate the right things, and make the right gestures. Above all, it is hostile to difference, curiosity, openness, and experimentation.

This phenomenon cannot be exhaustively described, because it is always mutating and recirculating. The problem is not simply that people are unaware of it—we think it is common among those touched by radical milieus. As the anarchist researcher and organizer Chris Dixon writes,

Whenever this topic comes up in discussions, I’ve found it quickly evokes head nods and horror stories about takedowns on social media, organizational territorialism, activist social status hierarchies, sectarian posturing, and a general atmosphere of radical self-righteousness.[127]

It can be risky to discuss all this publicly; there is always the chance that one will be cast as a liberal, an oppressor, or a reactionary. For this reason, these conversations are happening between people who already trust each other enough to know that they will not be met with immediate suspicion or attack. Here there is room for questioning and listening, with space for subtlety, nuance, and care that is so often absent when rigid radicalism takes hold. These are some of the questions we have been asking in our research: What is this force? What are its contours, and what are its sources? What triggers it, and what makes it spread? How can it be warded off, and how are people activating other ways of being?

Rigid radicalism is both a fixed way of being and a way of fixing. It fixes in the sense of attempting to repair, seeing emergent movements as inherently flawed. To fix is to see lack everywhere, and treat struggles and projects as broken and insufficient. It also fixes in the sense of fastening or making permanent, converting fluid practices into set ways of being, stagnating their transformative potential. Even though unfolding practices might appear identical to each other from a distance, habits and certainties can take over from what was once experimental and lively. When rigidity and suspicion take over, joy dies out.

This is probably our bleakest chapter, focusing as it does on the contours of rigid radicalism and how it circulates. We want to offer up some ideas about how this all works, but we are not trying to pin it down once and for all. We have been reading about this phenomenon, talking with friends, and interviewing people, and so we hope to contribute to a conversation that we know is ongoing. We want to tell stories about it, not the story. We do not think there is any single cause, or a single response.

In our first attempts at writing about this, and in many of our interviews, we used the concept of “sad militancy” to describe this phenomenon, but we have abandoned the term because it has not worked for some people we talked to. Drawing on Spinoza’s conception of sadness as stagnation, the notion of sad militancy has been circulating for a while, especially in Latin America. Nevertheless, we have noticed that it can easily be interpreted instead as a pathologization or condemnation of depression or sorrow. Furthermore we use the word “radicalism” because we want to avoid creating a dichotomy between two types of militancy. Rigid radicalism is not the “opposite” of joyful militancy; they are two different processes, animated by distinct affects.

It is a bit scary to write about these tendencies. Throughout the process of writing this book, we have come up against the worry that it will be decided we got it wrong: that we are reactionaries, or liberals, or oppressive in some way that we had not anticipated. Someone will reveal that we do not have “good politics,” that the book is too theoretical, or not theoretical enough, or romantic, or full of hippie shit, or naïve, or misleading, or problematic, or liberal, or useless, or, or, or. We will have committed our ridiculous ideas to print, in a permanent humiliation. For us, this fear exposes the durability of rigid radicalism, and how it can trigger paranoia, impose self-censorship and conformity, and encourage a kind of detached self-righteousness.

It’s those people

These conversations are already happening frequently. Rigid radicalism is a public secret: something that people already sense but which nonetheless maintains its affective hold.[128] It structures desires and movements in disempowering ways despite our awareness, and keeps us stuck in loops of anxiety, fear, suspicion, and certainty. As such, it cannot be attacked head-on.

When this public secret is discussed, it is all too easily converted into a moralistic argument, targeting individuals or groups: the problem is those rigid radicals, out there, separate from us. Some criticisms of rigid radicalism set themselves apart from or above it, as if they are the ones who truly see, and rigid radicals are trapped in a fog. The problem is that this critique repeats a common stance of rigid radicalism itself: someone holds a truth and brings it to others in need of enlightenment. We hope to approach rigid radicalism differently, while recognizing that it is easy to slip into, to stoke, and to activate.

Like joyful militancy, rigid radicalism cannot be reduced to certain people or behaviors. It is not that there are a bunch of assholes out there stifling movements and imploding worlds. In fact, this vigilant search for flawed people or behaviors—and the exposure of them everywhere—can be part of rigid radicalism itself. As a public secret, there is no point in shouting about it. It is more like a gas: continually circulating, working on us behind our backs, and guiding us towards rigidities, closures, and hostility.

No one is immune to it, just as no one is immune to being pulled into liberalism and other patterns of Empire. The air makes us cough certainties: some feel provoked, and attack or shrink away; others push cough medicine; but none of this stops anyone from getting sicker. For us at least, there is no cure, no gas mask, no unitary solution. There are only openings, searches, and the collective discovery of new and old ways of moving that let in fresh air. And for the same reason that no one is immune, anyone can participate in its undoing.

To confront rigid radicalism effectively, we think, is not to pin it down and attack it, but to understand it so that we can learn to dissipate it. Because these tendencies are linked to fear, anxiety, shame—to our very desires and sense of who we are and what we are becoming—we think it is important to approach all of this with care and compassion. It also requires recognizing and making the other tendencies palpable: rigid radicalism is always already coming apart, and joy is always already emerging. Ultimately, we think that rigidity is undone by activating, stoking, and intensifying joy, and defending it with militancy and gentleness; in other words, figuring out how to transform our own situations, treat each other well, listen to each other, experiment, and fight together.

The paradigm of government

Where does rigid radicalism come from? Surely there are a multiplicity of sources. Ultimately, we think it is an inheritance of Empire. It has been suggested to us that rigid radicalism is primarily a Euro-colonial phenomenon: that is, it is most intense in spaces where whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and colonization have the strongest hold.[129] These divisions induce habits of relating based in crisis and lack, as capitalism constantly pits people and groups in competition with each other. But rigid radicalism does not exactly mimic Empire; it emerges as a reaction to it, as an aspiration to be purely against it. When we spoke to adrienne maree brown, she suggested that it is an outgrowth of terror and violence:

Nick and carla: What sustains it?

brown: The culture that there is only one way to be radical in the world, one way to create change.

Nick and carla: What provokes or inspires it? What makes it spread?

brown: Terror. We are dying out here. So much destruction is in motion. I think there is a feeling of urgency, that we need discipline and rigor to meet this massive threat to our existence—racism, capitalism, climate, all of it. It feels like we need to be an army.[130]

Empire’s destruction in motion can trigger desires for control and militarized discipline. It can lead to a monolithic notion of the right way to be radical, hostile, and suspicious towards other ways of being. It forces out the messiness of relationships and everyday life in favor of clear lines between good/bad and radical/reactionary. In this sense, rigid radicalism imports Empire’s tendencies of fixing, governing, disciplining, and controlling, while presenting these as a means of liberation or revolution. In this sense, many radical movements in the West (and elsewhere) have been entangled in what Spanish intellectual Amador Fernández-Savater has called the paradigm of government:

In the paradigm of government, being a militant implies always being angry with what happens, because it is not what should happen; always chastising others, because they are not aware of what they should be aware of; always frustrated, because what exists is lacking in this or that; always anxious, because the real is permanently headed in the wrong direction and you have to subdue it, direct it, straighten it. All of this implies not enjoying, never letting yourself be carried away by the situation, not trusting in the forces of the world.[131]

In the paradigm of government, one always has an idea of what should be happening, and this gets in the way of being present with what is always already happening and the capacity to be attuned to the transformative potentials in one’s own situation. Under the paradigm of government, people are never committed enough. Silvia Federici spoke to this when we interviewed her:

This is why I don’t believe in the concept of “self-sacrifice,” where self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to repress ourselves. This has been a common practice in political movements in the past. But it is one that produces constantly dissatisfied individuals.[132]

Because rigid radicalism induces a sense of duty and obligation everywhere, there is a constant sense that one is never doing enough. In this context, “burnout” in radical spaces is not just about being worn out by hard work; it is often code for being wounded, depleted, and frayed: “I’m fucking burning.” What depletes us is not just long hours, but the tendencies of shame, anxiety, mistrust, competition, and perfectionism. It is the way in which these tendencies stifle joy: they prevent the capacity for collective creativity, experimentation, and transformation. Often, saying one is burnt out is the safest way to disappear, to take a break, to take care of oneself and get away from these dynamics.

Decline and counterrevolution

Rigid radicalism often arises as a reaction to a decline of transformative and enabling movements. Empire, for its part, responds to resurgent movements and uprisings by deploying ever more sophisticated forms of repression and control. Surveillance, criminalization, and imprisonment are used to destroy people’s capacity to organize. Waves of austerity and accumulation lead to more debt, higher costs of living, and economic scarcity. Pacification through the NGO-industrial complex helps to capture and domesticate movements so that they can be managed and organizing can be professionalized. This is always at least partially effective: parts of movements get destroyed, co-opted, subdued, and divided. In the process, what was once a transformative practice can become a stagnant ritual, emptied of its power. Sebastian Touza gives an example from his experience in the student movement in Argentina:

I think shifts toward joy often happen when people organize to do things in novel ways because there is a new opportunity to organize or because the old ways no longer work. I became a member of the student movement at my university at the end of the last dictatorship in Argentina in 1983. I remember the first years of consolidation of the democratic institutions as a period in which experimentation was alive. The people of my generation had no idea what a political party was like (after eight years of dictatorship during which parties were prohibited). Militants were willing to revise everything, were open to listen to all sorts of ideas about how to organize. Today, as a professor, two or three generations of student militants later, I see the students at the university where I work too convinced that doing things the way they do them is the only possible way. All ideas about politics as experimentation have been lost in the student movement, if we can call a movement a collection of people who rarely think outside their respective party lines. Joy has to do with a capacity for new encounters, to a disposition to new affects and ideas, with desiring differently, with setting into question the reproduction of things as they are. Sadness, on the contrary, has to do with fear of leaving the safety of a routine which let many survive, but very few or nobody at all to really live and enjoy what they do.[133]

In times of decline there is a tendency for movements to turn inward or fixate on old strategies or received ways of doing things. Curiosity calcifies into certainty, closing off the capacity for experimentation along with its transformative potential.

The perils of comparing

Rigid radicalism can also take hold through comparing one’s own situation with other times and places. 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, and intense. It can activate a feeling that people around us are too flawed, too complacent, or that our own worlds are lacking something: that they are not insurrectionary enough, not big enough, not militant enough, not caring enough. Change can feel out of reach across an unbridgeable chasm. This can lead to cynicism and pessimism, and a detached certainty that the here and now is not a place of joy and transformation: revolts might be widespread elsewhere, but everything is fucked here; people are passive, and there is no real struggle going on.

Alternatively, the chasm can lead to a desire to cultivate only one’s own garden, or retreat into little cliques and milieus, where there is a semblance of safety, security, and predictability: everything around us is corrupt, but we can live out our beautiful ideals in our own little world. This is the creation of alternatives in isolation, rather than through combat that connects to other movements and forms of life.

It can also lead to the endless refinement of a militant ideology that provides certainty to its adherents, continually reinforced by the perceived failures of those who do things differently: if they only understood, in the way that we do, things would be different. These cynical, escapist, or ideological responses to Empire are completely understandable. We feel this way often. We have noticed that it happens, in particular, when we anxiously evaluate our own lives or situations in relation to others, against a universal standard of radicalness.

Having good politics

But enough! Enough! I can’t endure it any more. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where man fabricates ideals—it seems to me it stinks from nothing but lies.

—Friedrich Nietzsche[134]

One way we see this measuring stick of radicalness materializing is through the notion of “good politics.” In many places today, it has become common to say of an individual or group, “they have good politics.” What does it mean to have good politics? What happens when politics becomes something a person has, rather than something people do together, as a shared practice? What happens when shared practices always have to be announced and their goodness displayed? Increasingly, we suggest, having good politics means taking the right positions, saying the right things, circulating the most radical things on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, calling out the right people for being wrong, and having well-formed opinions. In this sense, having good politics is similar to “having a good analysis.” When analysis becomes a trait, rather than a collective and curious process, it stagnates.

We are encouraged—and we often encourage each other—to wear our politics and analysis like badges, as markers of distinction. When politics becomes something that one has, like fashion, it always needs to be visible in order to function. Actions need to be publicized, positions need to be taken, and our everyday lives need to be spoken loudly to each other. One is encouraged to make calculations about political commitments based on how they will be seen, and by whom. Politics becomes a spectacle to be performed. This reaches its height online, where sharing the right things and speaking the right words tend to be the only ways that people can know each other. Groups need to turn inward and constantly evaluate themselves in relation to these ideals and then project them outward, proclaiming their intentions, values, programs, and missions.

But since one can only have good politics in comparison to someone else that lacks them, rigid radicalism tends towards constant comparison and measuring. Often the best way to avoid humiliation for lacking good politics is to find others lacking in militancy, radicalism, anti-oppression, or some other ideal. One’s politics can never quite match these perfectionist ideals, so one is subjected to constant shame and fear.

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. One’s opponents in the game of good politics and rigid radicalism are not capitalists, nor white supremacists, nor police; they are others vying for the correct ways of thinking about and fighting capitalism, white supremacy, and policing. Comparison and evaluation of different camps or currents can be so constant that it becomes an end in itself: every encounter with a new current must be approached with a distrustful search for flaws. We come to know others—their beliefs, their commitments, their worth—based on how good they are at staking out a position.

In this sense, rigid radicalism is not one political current, but a tendency that seeps into many different currents and milieus today. In some milieus, the currency of good politics is a stated (or demonstrated) willingness for direct action, riots, property destruction, and clashes with police. In others, it is the capacity for anti-oppressive analysis, avoidance of oppressive statements, and the calling out of those who make them. In others it is the capacity to avoid work and survive without buying things or paying rent. In some it is adherence to a vision of leftism or revolution, and in others it is the conviction that the Left is dead and revolution is a stupid fantasy. In some it is the capacity to have participated in a lot of projects, or to be connected to a big network of radical organizers. In every case, there is a tendency for one milieu to dismiss the commitments and values of the others and to expose their inadequacies. At its extreme, this generates a form of sectarianism that is fueled by the very act of being vocally sectarian.

The newcomer is immediately placed in a position of debt: owing dedication, self-sacrifice, and correct analysis that must be continuously proved. Whether it is the performance of anti-oppressive language, revolutionary fervor, nihilist detachment, or an implicit dress code, those who are unfamiliar with the expectations of the milieu are doomed from the start unless they “catch up” and conform. In subtle and overt ways, they will be attacked, mocked, and excluded for getting it wrong, even though these people are often the ones that “good politics” is supposed to support: those without formal education who have not been exposed much to radical milieus, but who have a stake in fighting.

None of this is meant to suggest that we should be more wishy-washy about oppression, or that hard lines are wrong, or that all radical practices are corrupt or bad. Developing analysis, naming mistakes, and engaging in conflict are all indispensable. To undo rigid radicalism is not a call to “get along” or “shut up and take action” or “be spontaneous.” People’s capacities to challenge and unlearn oppressive behaviors, take direct action, or avoid selling labor and paying rent can create and deepen cracks in Empire. They can all be part of joyful transformation. But any of these practices can also become measuring sticks for comparison and evaluation that end up devaluing other practices and stifling the growth of collective capacities.

When politics circulates in a world dominated by hypervisibility and rigidity, there is a huge swath of things that do not count, and can never count: the incredible things that people do when nobody is looking, the ways that people support and care for each other quietly and without recognition, the hesitations and stammerings that come through the encounter with other ways of living and fighting, all the acts of resistance and sabotage that remain secret, the slow transformations that take years or decades, and all of the ineffable, joyful movements and struggles that can never be fully captured in words or displayed publicly. Rigid radicalism is a barrier to co-learning, listening, and questioning, and to undoing our subjection (our sedimented habits). It blocks the difficult recovery and discovery of responsibility, and the capacity to carve out relationships based in trust and care. The game of good politics makes it much more difficult to be humble, responsive, and creative. No one can have any of this. Joyful common notions can never be possessed; they can only be developed and sustained collectively. They are shared powers that grow in and through transformative relationships and struggles. When held up as a badge of honor or gripped as an identity, they die, detached from the processes and relationships that animate them.

Rigid radicalism stifles joy: it drains out vital energies by enforcing external norms and standards, and by feeding insecurities and anxieties. The greatest tragedy of all is that it does so by converting a lived and changing radicalism into a stifling ideal, like a horizon that is always in view, distant and receding.

These tendencies have led many to abandon radical milieus. This is the narrowing of possibilities induced by rigid radicalism: either continue in a stifling and depleting atmosphere, or leave and attempt to live the form of life that is offered up by Empire. For many, this is not a choice at all because one’s very survival is connected to the same spaces where rigid radicalism has taken hold. In this sense, rigid radicalism can be lethal. At the same time, efforts to transform all this are already underway, and many people are initiating conversations about undoing some of these tendencies within the milieus they inhabit. Others are fleeing explicitly radical milieus, creating something new at the margins of both Empire and visibly radical spaces. By breaking off with a crew of friends, some have built quieter alternatives and hubs elsewhere that enable new forms of movement and revive squelched possibilities. There are many ways of letting in fresh air. Rigid radicalism is only one tendency among others, even when it is the dominant one. This is why we have started with—and focused on—joyful militancy in this book.