This interview was completed in early 2016 as part of the research for Joyful Militancy. We (carla and Nick) sent Marina Sitrin a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind the book, and then included a couple questions based on Sitrin’s other writings (especially Horizontalidad — published in English as Horizontalism — and Everyday Revolutions). As time went on in the researching, interviewing and writing of the book our ideas and articulations shifted and for that, we are deeply indebted to all our interviewees who offered new insights and shed light on areas that needed reworking.

Interview:

carla & Nick (c&N): Based on what we’ve told you about the book project, can you tell us what resonates and what doesn’t?

Marina Sitrin (MS): I am so excited for this project. It all resonates deeply with things I have been thinking, witnessing, fearing and dreaming. The role of joy, in particular in the way you describe it, is often absent – though not entirely – from our conversations and constructions in the northern part of the Americas and Europe. I do see joyful militancy as closely tied with emotion, on the individual and collective level, and will get to that with some of the later questions. It is both a fairly large and abstract concept, and at the same time a very simple direct and emotive one.

How do we feel when we participate in a movement or group? What are our relationships to others in the group? Does it feel open? Caring? Social? Is there trust? Why do we come back to assemblies and actions? Are people open to one another?

c&N: We have been told that “joyful militancy” or “militancia alegre” is a more common notion in Latin America.  Do you know anything about the genealogies or origins of “militancia alegre” in Latin America?

MS: I don’t know of any specific genealogy, but there are for sure many examples of the practice and language of care, trust, love and affect throughout the history of movements in Latin America. I see joyful militancy as both a practice and an articulation – ideally both together. As a practice it does not always come with an articulation of the experience, and then there are those groups and movements that have the explicit language of care and love, but do not always practice it. My first exposure to it as a concept together with a practice was in Argentina in the post 2001 popular rebellion and all the social creation that transpired.

In Argentina, when people found themselves without even the basic means for survival, they turned to one another. They did this without political parties, intermediaries or any sort of hierarchy. People explained this moment in history as a rupture, a break with past ways of organizing, but also a break in their finding one another – looking to one another. The effects of the dictatorship maintained a hold on many aspects of daily life, including fear of the other and a culture of turning one’s back in silence. HIJOS, the children of the disappeared, had been organizing for a few years in this silence, with internal forms that focused more on social relationships than an “end”. Their argument is that, at least in part, it was people in society who allowed the dictatorship to take place, with what they call a social silence. They organize in neighborhoods, speaking to people, face to face, and trying to recreate community. Their internal forms of organizing are also focused on social relationships, and in particular horizontal and affective forms. They speak of love as a relationship necessary in their group’s internal relationships as well as the sort of movement that has to be built. HIJOS in many ways was a precursor to the forms of organizing a few years later with the neighborhood assemblies, unemployed movements and recuperated workplaces, among tons of other collectives and networks that emerged.

I would love to share quote after quote of people in the movements in Argentina. I was honestly a bit surprised at how much people spoke of love and care as necessary to create the sort of world they desire. But now, in retrospect, the fact that the forms of organizing are all about social relationships—paying attention to power, making sure people are heard and can speak, prioritizing voices often excluded and ignored, organizing events with food, drinks, music and other tools that make them more social—were crucial and often just necessary for survival. Care is at the heart of the new forms of organizing. Horizontalism as a relationship is all about a shifting relational form between individuals and a group – paying attention to both – now. It is not a means to an end, but the means are a part of the end, and the end keeps changing.

Another example from Latin America, and one that is more of a practice and less something talked about as a tenet around which they organize, is the Zapatista communities. Their forms of organizing are based in assemblies striving for all people to participate equally and in creating structures of care, from health care to food and education, and then also creating processes for alternative adjudication—all of this is deeply affective, even if they do not shout to the world that they are joyous and grounded in affect. The joy is seen in these affective practices as well as in the celebratory nature of many of day to day experiences.

I see the concepts of joyful militancy, affective politics and a care/love-based organizing as also directly tied to prefigurative politics, and that has a long history and roots in Latin America. By prefigurative I mean as much as possible creating the desired future alternatives in the present.  This is an idea and practice that has roots all over the world, from the IWW in the US to the writings of W.E.B DuBois, and the practices of anarchists and autonomous activists in Latin America. It has become more popular and widespread, both in theory and practice, in the last twenty years with the rise of more autonomous and horizontal organizing, particularly in Latin America, but also with the Global Justice Movement and Occupy and movements of the Squares.

Going back to Latin America, while the more contemporary movements organize with affective politics as one of the hearts, consciously and intentionally, there is a long history of this sentiment as a part of organizing, including say the FORA in Argentina (the largest Anarchist federation in the world) which was a part of organizing Patagonia Rebelde, a free region in the south of Argentina in the early 1900s. While it was brutally repressed, the movement organized to create a free society then and there, rather than demanding or building towards a future society. This included all sorts of different social relationships which entailed care, trust and love as their foundation. This is a history that many contemporary movement participants have ideas about, but few have read about it in great detail. It is one of those funny things where historical memory is somehow imbued in current practice, even without a direct intentionality.

I also wonder about liberation theology and the role of love and care in Latin American movements today. Similar to the role of the memory of anarchism in Argentina, in some parts of Latin America, the liberation theologists actively supported revolutionary movements and for sure brought in the importance of love and care in the present – not just the future. Of course the Catholic church as a whole, like the communist parties, were all about the future and not the present.

c&N: You have described the work you do as a form of militancy.  Can you say what you mean by this concept?  What is militancy about, and what does it do?

MS: I also describe myself as a militant. I say this in part to counter the concept of activist, especially as it is understood in parts of Latin America, which is as oriented to NGOs – more ‘professional and paid’. In Spanish una militante is often someone who was a part of something, such as a movement or group, though not something like Greenpeace. It describes a more direct action sort of politics. And, in English, as it sounds, it has a force or action orientation – not militaristic, that is not what I mean – but determined and maybe hard left. I am not sure exactly how best to translate it alone; I use it as an alternative to identifying as an activist and to indicate direct involvement and revolutionary politics.

As for the work I do, I tend to think of it as militant research, and by this I mean a form of research and investigation that is together with people in movement, so again, militant meaning a sort of direct participation and action. I try as best as I can to not only use interview-based work, but to be involved in those things I write about and to engage back and forth with movement participants (if I am not active in that movement all the time) so as to check and make sure I am reflecting what people are doing/thinking. Sometimes this leads to a lot more work or investigation, as happened in Argentina when I was close to finishing the book Horizontalidad: Voces de Poder Popular en Argentina.^[i] I thought it was just about finished and circulated it with a number of movement participants. I got great feedback, and a few women from two different unemployed movements gently told me, compañera, you cannot publish this, it does not include the direct struggles of the Mapuche or Guarani, not in their own words. So, I took another many months, built relationships with a few indigenous communities in the far north, was fortunate to be joined by one of these two women when I went, and then was able to finish the book.

All together then, this sort of work can become a form of militancy as it can help connect people from different groups and movements who might not otherwise meet one another. For example, having developed relationships with more autonomous movements in Greece, and collaborating with a network of assemblies who translated Horiozntalidad into Greek, we found that not only were the voices in the book useful, but there was an opportunity to create direct relationships. So twice I helped initiate visits of Argentines to Greece. The second such visit was a worker from a recuperated workplace who met with workers in Vio.Me in Thessaloniki, and after the visit and exchange of ideas the Greek workers decided absolutely to recuperate their workplace. They say that without the direct exchange of ideas they might not have done it. The sharing of movement contacts and relationships across movements, countries and continents is for me a part of being a militant who does militant research.

c&N: What’s been your experience of sad militancy^[ii]–meanness, shame, fear, guilt, and ideological purism–in movement spaces?

1.     What sustains sad militancy?
2.     What provokes or inspires it?  What makes it spread?

MS: I have put off this question for second to last. And now am again taking a break, since as important as it is, it is such an ugly and sad part of our movements I am going to wait a moment before writing about it. I will answer it however, since it is also what has destroyed so many groups and movements – so utterly important.

Sad militancy can come from many places. First, and important to identify is when it comes from external forces, people who are paid to disrupt movements and do so in all sorts of ways from disrupting democratic processes and assemblies, to those who spread gossip and create divisions amongst people in the movement. This has been seen in so many movements historically and there is a great deal to learn from these experiences, particularly the disruption of the Black Panthers – and here I am thinking of some of the lesser known and insidious tactics such as “poison pen letters”.

I would like to end it there, but sad militancy is not just something that people from the outside are paid to do – and in fact, they are able to be paid to do it because we are so susceptible to it. On a basic level, the space a group or movement creates from the beginning is key – the tone and openness, or not, makes a big difference if one wants to focus on new relationships with one another. Along these same lines, ideological rigidity and hierarchies in ideas, formal and informal, create a closed and eventually nasty space for those not ascribing to the ideology or a part of the clique. People do not stay in movements that organize in this way, or if they do it is with a sort of obedience that is not transformative for society and instead creates versions of the same power and hierarchy – with people not being actors or agents of change, not to mention that dignity cannot grow or flourish.

My early organizing experiences were fortunately with anti-racist and later Central American Solidarity movements, with people who had been a part of the civil rights and later anti-nuclear movements, so they had a focus—at least in part—on social relationships and democracy. Later however, when I decided I needed to be a part of a revolutionary group that was organizing against capitalism as a whole, well, I found myself in a few different centrist socialists groups which were really soul deadening. It was all about ideology and guilt. One could never do enough, and could never know enough or quote enough of whomever was the revolutionary of the day (James Cannon, Tony Cliff, etc.). It was also politically all about the end and not the day-to-day. This even included women: one would think after the radical feminist movement these groups would get that relationships have to change now, but no, it was all about the future free society we all had to work for – accepting relationships as they are pretty much. I later came around some anarchist groups, thinking that they would be more open and focused on the day-to-day, as that is what I had read from the theory, but found the rigidity around identity too harsh and since I was not squatting or dressing a certain way I was kept at arm’s length – which was fine since I felt too rejected to try very hard.

Enough of these icky groups. I think the big question for today is how do we organize in ways that try to prevent sad militancy from creeping into our practice. Articulation of a joyful movement is important, and not as easy as one might think since there is so much resistance to the idea of feelings, which is also to say, relationships. Many in Argentina reflected on this, especially men in the unemployed movements and workplaces who would joke that they would approach people on the street and ask if they wanted to join a “love movement” and get punched. But it was a real question of machismo they were addressing. I do not mean just men here either, though it is the joke. Social relationships are increasingly given lip service, but we often do not work on them in our movements in a way that makes them dynamic enough to really create an affective space. Relationships here means not only how we treat one another individually, but things like our democratic practices as a whole and how and if we adjudicate or resolve conflicts that arise. So first, talking about it and stating clearing that it is important. But then, some movements do this and still sad militancy sneaks in, or jumps in, depending … it often concerns democratic practices and questions of flexibility—it is crucial to be able to change our practices as well as our ideas. That does not mean to be without clear ideas that are collective, but to avoid the ideological traps that can happen. Autonomous and anti-authoritarian movements are hardly exempt from this. In Occupy we sometimes found people arguing they were more horizontal than others, or more autonomous … this creates a closed and defensive space.

One way to try and keep our movements and groups more open is to be more open ourselves. To call things out when we see them. Not in a hostile way, but in the sense of identifying it and talking about it collectively, in special assemblies or in the moment. This is tricky as it can come off as hostile and people can easily get defensive – we live in a society where we are all so very fragile that calling someone out almost always leads to defensiveness … so figuring out ahead of time how we will deal with these issues as they come up and sticking to it. I am thinking now of how Occupy Farms in Albany California, learning from some of the difficult and sometimes nasty things that emerged in Occupy, organized based on a few common agreements and to participate all had to agree. Things that included participation – not as a ‘work ethic’ sort of thing, but that if one was going to be a part of a collective farm, one had to be a part of a working group that did things (without creating ableist hierarchies, of course).

This avoided people coming to just hang out and speaking in assemblies from a position of ideas alone without practice. In Argentina, when people were disruptive in assemblies, it was called out (this was learned first by having assemblies destroyed by disruption). People are told to stop, and if it does not work they are asked to leave. It is more complicated than that, but that is the essence for some assemblies. In the 15M they had a group of people that was always roving during assemblies to try and support those people who were disrupting, believing they needed support, and not to be silenced.

c&N: What’s been your experience of joyful militancy?

1.     What inspires/encourages/sustains it?
2.     How do you try to embody it?

MS: My first experiences with joyful militancy, without having a name for it at the time, were very specific and location-based. I went to Seattle in 1999 to participate in the protests. Later in the day, when the repression picked up, I found myself alone and scared for a moment – only a moment however as an experienced anarchist from San Diego helped me quickly join their affinity group. Not only did I come without an affinity group, but what I knew of them was from reading Murray Bookchin on the Spanish Revolution. It was all a wonderful idea, like assembly based decision making and councils, but I had no direct experience with them. I had been a part of a few different hierarchical socialist groups and left all of then in part due to the hierarchy and centrism, but also what for sure can be called sad militancy. I had witnessed mass assemblies and direct democracy, including in Tepotzlan Mexico where people had taken over the town in the later 1990s, but still had had no direct participation – I did not know what it felt like to be a part of it. Not until Seattle.

So, this wonderful person, whose name I have since forgotten, brought me into a small group and together we blocked an alley where delegates were trying to pass, and supported one another in the massive tear gas attacks by the police, as well as negotiated road blocks of burning dumpsters and projectiles launched to protect people from the police. It was quite scary, but I did not feel fear as much as energy. I was now with a small group of people who were taking care of each other, checking in with one another all the time and taking breaks to do so.  And then that evening there was a spokescouncil and I felt that “aha” moment where it all made sense. The ideas I had read about with direct democracy and people caring for one another was all around me, even amidst the tear gas and injured people – perhaps even because of it – which brought up the stakes and made the care and trust all the more important. It was a short lived experience, but has marked me forever.

As for longer, deeply grounded movements based in affective politics and joyful militancy, that for sure would be Argentina post 2001. While emerging from necessity, from a rupture in society that was both crisis and a newfound finding of one another on the streets, it continued in many of the movements, taking deep root and becoming the place from which people organized and mobilized. What sustained it in many places was concrete projects around which people were organizing, from running workplaces to maintaining popular kitchens or media groups, together with open discussion of what it was/is. Collective reflection cannot be underestimated, and by this I do not mean only having assemblies to discuss what we are doing or will do next – and not either reflecting on what we have done. But reflecting on the meanings behind what we are doing and why. Taking time to explore ideas and our feelings related to them. There were constant discussions and assemblies in all of the movements, from the recuperated workplaces during lunch and breaks to weekly gatherings within the unemployed movements and parts of the agenda of the neighborhood assemblies. There were also assemblies comprised of people from the different movements to discuss things together, like autonomy, autogestion and affective politics, and this was done in a way that reflected the politics of the movements, with openness and care, in the discussions and infrastructure – meaning there was food and breaks with music and murgas, helping to facilitate the celebratory and emotive elements involved in all of it.

As for my personal attempts to try and embody a politics of affect and joyful militancy, I don’t know. On a very basic level, but one that really does mean a lot, and at the risk of being dismissed as unserious, I try and be open, smile, and really listen and ask questions with others in the movements. Welcoming people, asking about their lives and being friendly is a bigger deal than most people realize. Feeling welcome into a space that is new, feeling like people care about who you are and not just what action you are participating in is huge. On a more general level, I try and create space for others to speak and be heard, and in a way that is meaningful. This often means things like helping to make sure there is facilitation that allows and develops listening, as well as creating a warm climate and atmosphere around discussions, assemblies and other spaces. I like to think I try and reach out to younger and sometimes lesser experienced participants so as to help them feel heard and involved. This is almost always with younger women. In Occupy in New York, I shifted early on to focusing on the legal group since we did not have much of one when it began. A space or movement without legal support, especially in an action that is not legal in certain respects, is not serious, and for sure does not have affect and care at its core. We must protect all people in their/our bodies; this means legally and in the streets with affinity groups. Within the legal group of Occupy we quickly discovered that we not only needed to create legal support for the hundreds arrested, but also to create spaces of mediation for the conflicts coming up in the Plaza. I was a part of a legal subgroup, together with Safer Spaces, that was trying to set up a mechanism not only for mediation but also the adjudication of conflict. Without ways of resolving conflict within our movements we cannot say we take care, trust and affect seriously.

c&N: Because we think joy and sadness are always moving and shifting into new configurations, we are really curious about how these shifts take place.  Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift from joyful militancy into sad militancy, or vice-versa?  What leads to these shifts?

MS: I have seen movements go from joyful to sad, though it is usually soon before they break up as that specific form of movement. From my experience, this has often been when there is very specific activity on behalf of one or a few people who are extremely disruptive and their disruptions are not dealt with. Our culture of silence or even being polite and not wanting to say things out loud, at least not collectively is a real problem. It allows one or a few people to dominate groups of hundreds and event thousands as was the case with Occupy. This was not the only thing that happened with Occupy, but was among them. In Argentina I saw it happen with left political parties intentionally destroying horizontal assemblies (something that is much harder to do today since they have learned hard lessons and changed their practices). I also saw it with the role of money in movements: from the unemployed movements having to be “managers” of state money and deciding who gets it or not as the government never gave enough, to NGO money in movements creating divisions and finally, to what was for sure government intervention by way of paid disruptors who—when all the other forms of disruption did not work—used direct violence, burning homes and shooting at participants until the land-based movement dispersed. This however raises bigger questions about defense of movements, perhaps for another book.

c&N: In your book, Everyday Revolutions,^[iii] you continually return to the rejection of ideology and how important this has been for movements to create communities based in love and trust. It sounds like in Argentina, what is being rejected is the traditional ideology of Marxism that tends towards vanguardism, hierarchy, and so on. Is there something about all ideology that gets in the way of love and trust across differences?

MS: After the 2001 economic collapse people in Argentina came together from all sorts of backgrounds, as well as networked across all sorts of social classes and identity based groups. The unemployed with the formerly identified urban middle class, the Guarani and Mapuche with media collectives and children of the disappeared (HIJOS) and workers recuperating their workplaces with all of the above. People organized in their locations and came together out of necessity. They forced out four governments in the first months of the rebellion with sheer popular power – people in the streets banging pots and pans (cacerolando). No one called people together, not unions or political parties, they did not have formal leaderships, banners or posters, or even united slogans in the beginning. They came together banging pots and pans and created the song – Que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo (They all must go, not even one shall remain). And it worked. They forced out presidents, heads of the judiciary, economy and other ministries. There was a rejection of what was – of political parties and forms of hierarchy (power over) that people saw as responsible for the economic crisis and mass privatization which in part destroyed the economy.

Again and again people who I spoke with while living there and those I’ve visited over the years insisted that they did not want to replicate the forms of organization that they saw as responsible … not only responsible for the crisis, but also all those groups and forms of organizing that were also seen as unable to respond sufficiently to these groups – so forms on the right and left. All political parties. So, yes, what you suggest with a rejection of Marxism as an ideology is true, but it was also true for anything that seemed to harken a pre-formed ideology or set of ideas. People wanted to create things anew – social relationships and forms of organizing. And this is where we get to some of the ideas in your next question. There were and continue to be consistent forms and ways of thinking about organizing and while it was in no way an ideology – there is an amazing consistency in the ways people across class and identity spoke and speak about these forms: new – rejecting the old – and creating something new in similar ways. I believe this is tied to what is being rejected, but will get to that next.

c&N: You continually point to the concepts of horizontalism, affective politics, autogestion, and autonomy as concepts that are widely shared among movements in Argentina. It’s clear that they’ve been central to constructing and sustaining movements, and warding off ideology and co-optation. You quote a number of movement participants who seem to refuse any concrete definition of the movements they’re part of, and you call these concepts “living words.” It seems clear that you and the voices you highlight are refusing rigid definitions of these terms–autonomy, horizontalism, love, and trust–so that they can be part of an ongoing discussion, and that this is different from an ideology. Can you say more about these differences? What is the difference between an ideological concept and a living word?

MS: First, the idea of a living word comes not from me, but people in the movements. I repeat it a lot since I love the way it captures what people are doing and striving towards, but it is for sure a concept that is also living and dynamic, from within the movements in Argentina. What is rejected is ideology, as I understand people in the movements, by this they mean any predetermined set of ideas or concepts that then are applied to life – to concrete situations. I don’t know that all ideology is rejected as an analysis for what is wrong in society – so elements of Marxism to explain capitalism … it is possible, but what is rejected is a set of ideas that will then “free” people or make for new social relationships. The focus of the movements is how people organize and relate now – in the day to day – and from there construct the future. This already implies a dynamic as the everyday changes, and thus the future, as related to the everyday, must change. The same is true for the ideas around which much of the organizing takes place.

Take for example Horizontalidad – a word that did not exist before in Spanish, or if it did it might have been used a few years prior by HIJOS, the children of the disappeared in Argentina… Horizontalidad was and is described as a relationship, a way of coming together without power over the other, as a way of having conversations and relating more generally. It is always described as a changing relationship since as people relate to one another they change and the group changes, thus the concept of the tools used also must change, thus the living part of the word. It is ever-changing and dynamic as it is used in life by people… It is not a description of a relationship either – not direct or participatory democracy, nor consensus – it is a relationship itself that might or might not use these other tools.

Similarly, autonomy and autogestion. Autonomy was used, together with horizontalidad and autogestion to articulate the focus of the movements being on and with one another – not looking ‘up’ but horizontally. Seeing power as something created together, and also as a live thing, not something to take or be given. Autonomy has been used to distinguish both movements and groups, as well as individuals. Deciding for ourselves or oneself. Not having a party or politician dictate what to do or how… autonomy is a practice and dynamic – not an ideology and theory – and the danger of calling it a theory is that it can become less “alive” less of a practice. In a number of movements, when offered ‘gifts’ and subsides from the state, they continued to call themselves autonomous while simultaneously organizing based on the agenda of the state, and eventually the splits within the movements became too big. But that is another story, and entails sad militancy: with the stagnation of autonomy, the trust and care within the movements also unraveled.

One of the things that I believe has helped keep autonomy and horizontalidad as living words is the practices connected with them. It is not abstract. To be autonomous and horizontal is related to concrete practice. So what is that practice? Those movements that self organize, from the recuperated workplaces (of which there are over 350) to the self organized unemployed movements (a handful still) and media networks and alternative outlets (of which there are around 60) have all continued, even with challenges, and they all argue that part of their ability to face the challenges posed by the state has been their level of self-organization or autogestion. They also intertwine this practice of autogestion with a practice of autonomy and every changing relationships of horizontalidad.

This brings us to affective politics: a politics based in affect, trust, care and love, as people in the movements describe it. This is something I describe more earlier, but it cannot be left out of any question related to the dynamics of the movements and how they are rejecting ideology and instead are creating ever-changing dynamic relationships.

c&N: We have the sense that the situation in North America is a lot different Argentina and other places in Latin America. One of the most striking differences, from our perspective, is that the dense networks of love, care, and trust do not seem to exist in the same ways among the Left in North America, especially among European-descended settlers. What’s your impression of these differences, and what are the implications for movements in North America?

MS: Hmmm … I think a lot of this has to do with identity, class, experience and options in life. People who lack options, such as the unemployed workers in Argentina or the population facing a total economic collapse, have seemed to come together in very similar ways; both movements rejected hierarchy, power-over, and ideology while at the same time creating new ways of being together, self-organizing grounded in horizontal relationships and affect. As the movements continued over time it does seem like those that have self-organized out of necessity have lasted longer and continued with the same dynamic forms of organizing based in new social relationships.

Saying all this, I am now thinking about a conversation I recently had with two young people, one Mexican and one US, who had both been living in Oaxaca for years, collaborating with the Universidad de la Tierra and Gustavo Esteva in particular. They are now in another part of Mexico struggling to organize a social center, a small editorial (printing books and booklets) and a few other projects, all based in horizontal, autonomous and affective relationships. They are facing internal challenges for sure, and that is some of what we spoke about, but they continue and are quite motivated and really lovely, passionate, smart young organizers. They would be examples of people from the left, working with others on the left, to create these sorts of space – and while they need to self organize to survive, it is not to the same degree as say the unemployed in Argentina. They could get other jobs, even if with difficulty … so maybe I am contradicting myself, or maybe the first response to organize with autogestion, autonomy and horizontalidad, developing and grounding in affect, is something that is first a response, but can also be something intentional, if one is very very careful with each step and moves slowly. And, if we could all spend years with Gustavo Esteva, learning and sharing, well, that would be a wonderful gift.

So, after being so wordy here, the conclusion is that while joyful militancy is easier to maintain in places where organizing is based in necessity and the rejection of ideology and pre-formed ways of organizing take root much faster, it is not impossible or even improbable in other spaces where people have less urgency and necessity in their survival questions and options … what it does require in these ‘left’ spaces is a lot of attention to maintaining relationships as flexible and ever-changing. Learning from our companeros in the global south.

c&N: Where do you see love, trust, horizontalism, and autonomy being generated and sustained in North America? Or, do you see other, alternative common notions that animate North American movements?

MS: While I do for sure see autonomy, horizontalism, affect, trust and love animating US and Canadian movements, it is not what occurs to me first for these regions. Too often, at least in the US, there is a sort of territoriality of left ideas and sadly ideologies, even in the more autonomous spaces, so rather than flexible and caring ideas guiding our actions and relationships we cling to ideas and notions such as autonomy as a rigid dogma – “I am more autonomous than you” using forms of comparison with actions and even life choices. It has even occurred more recently with horizontalism, so rather than seeing it as an ever-changing relationship that must change as people change and a group changes, it is used as a particular definition of a form of consensus decision-making. We saw this in particular around the Occupy plazas. I have no idea where this came from since it has nothing to do with the way Argentines use it, but instead people argued for horizontalism to mean absolute consensus, not the striving for consensus, but that all must discuss and agree with the exception of one. (Something impossible in groups of people who do not know one another and particularly large groups as we had in New York, with over a thousand or two thousand people in assemblies at times.) What this points to is the rigidity that people—even those who have not been organized in movement or groups before—tend towards, which is a sort of hierarchy of ideas instead of flexible open relationships … maybe we have not broken from the traditional forms of change on the left as many others have. Or maybe when we become more flexible, those who have preconceived ideas of how change should happen jump in so fast and occupy the space that it seems like that is the majority opinion when it is not. I could explore this more, but would rather begin to think about those spaces where people have organized in these more dynamic and open ways.

Historically, there are tons of examples from the history of the US as well as around the world – we just have to look for them and listen well. For example, SNCC was grounded in participatory and direct democracy, with attempts at creating leadership and horizontal relationships, as well as beloved community overall. The radical feminist movement is fairly well known for working on more affective and care-based ties, focusing on sharing personal stories and creating atmospheres of openness within the movement. Following chronologically is the Anti Nuclear movement in the 1970s and 80s that in many areas was based in direct democracy and affinity groups, making sure to take care of each person bodily as well as with emotional support. I could go into many more examples, though that perhaps is for another project.

c&N: A common perception we’ve been grappling with is that joyful militancy is naïve—a failure to appreciate how bad things are (if you’re not sad/angry/cynical, you’re not paying attention) – how do you react to this?

MS: That is total nonsense. And I do not call many opinions nonsense, really, almost none. But from my experience, those people from whom I have learned about joyful militancy and affective politics are people in unemployed movements, people living in situations such as shanty towns, with nothing to live on and no real future prospects. Or, workers facing a life of unemployment taking over their factories. Or women in the Southern Non Violent Coordinating Committee in the south of the US. Here of course I did not participate, but have spoken to people who were involved in the movement and I read a great deal, and the concept of Beloved Community was key to what they were trying to construct. Inspired in part I believe by this form of organizing is now Black Lives Matter, who are best known for their interruptions in business as usual; less known is that the organizers try and ground their organizing explicitly in the politics of care and love. Black Lives Matter as a hashtag created by co-founder Patrisse Cullors was made famous almost instantaneously, though lesser known is the simultaneous “love letter” that was written by Alicia Garza, the other of the three women co-founders. Written to “Black folks” it speaks of the importance of loving oneself as well as organizing based in love. And recently, in interviews I have done and read with people who are spending lots of time in Rojava, from Janet Biehl to Kurdish women militant researchers, they all speak of the joy, happiness, laughter and smiles that fill the spaces of self-defense and creation that are the autonomous Cantons of Rojava. Women there speak of the importance of this care, joy and laughter. If they do not appreciate how “bad” things are, then, well, shit, no one does.

I do not write this to dismiss the question, it is an important one, and one I get all the time. Affect is not seen as serious. Both due to what people think is something “soft” or not looking to the bad, but also I think it is a deeply gendered and race-based argument. The people I know who are or did ground their organizing explicitly in affect, joy and beloved community are on the margins of society – they are women in groups and networks all over the world, the unemployed and queer movements in Argentina, SNCC in the US and currently the coordinators of Black Lives Matter, women in Rojava … I could go on and on, but the reality is the opposite of the argument being put forward. I do not want to place ideological or identity boxes on those posing these questions, but from my experience they do not come from similar backgrounds as the movements and networks I just mentioned. And last, forget academia. The idea that affective politics or love based organizing is seen as serious in social movement theory is just, well, not happening. I have been asked so many times, “what is that?” and then told to remove it from articles (which I refuse). Emotion yes, and negative emotion, for sure, but love and affect, no, it is seen as not serious. Who dominates the academic world? Some real similarities with those on the left also making the critique. But, I don’t want to spiral into who is to blame for not taking it seriously; it is not particularly useful. Most important is to do what you both are doing, which is bringing this form of organizing more into the public discourse as an option for organizing.

___________________________________________

^[i] The English translation of this book, edited by Marina Sitrin, was published as Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Oakland: AK Press, 2006

^[ii] Earlier in our process of researching and writing the book, we were using the concept of ‘sad militancy’ to describe the ways that radicalism can be intertwined with shame, fear, guilt and ideological purism. We later changed ‘sad militancy’ to ‘rigid radicalism’ in the book, in order to avoid confusion with the emotion of sadness.

^[iii] Marina Sitrin. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. London: Zed Books, 2012.

Images by Pete Railand at Justseeds

Lead image of Marina Sitrin from an interview with M Cem Menguc, “Horizontalism: This, But Not This (1001 Plateaus, # 1)”

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

The post Care is at the heart: an interview with Marina Sitrin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This interview with Silvia Federici was conducted in early 2016 by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery for Joyful Militancy. For this interview we (Nick and carla) sent a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind our book project, and had a conversation with based on the themes of our book and Federici’s other work.

Silvia Federici: My politics resonate with your idea of “joyful militancy.” I’m a strong believer that either your politics is liberating and that gives you joy, or there’s something wrong with them.

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.

When I was thinking about this conversation, I was reminded of Nietzsche’s metamorphoses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his image of the camel. The camel is the prototype of the militant who burdens herself with huge amounts of work, because she thinks that the destiny of the world depends on her overwork. Inevitably she’s always saddened because the goal is always receding and she does not have the time to be fully present to her life and recognize the transformative possibilities inherent to her work.

carla and Nick: You said that you feel like there are so many sources to sad militancy[1] and can you speak to some more of those?

Federici: Sad militancy comes from setting goals that you cannot achieve, so that the outcome is always out of reach, always projected into the future and you feel continuously defeated.  “Sad politics “ is also defining your struggle in purely oppositional terms, which puts you in a state of permanent tension and failure. A joyful politics is a politics that is constructive and prefigurative. I’m encouraged by the fact that more people today see that you cannot continuously postpone the achievement of your goals to an always receding future.

Joyful politics is politics that change your life for the better already in the present. This is not to deny that political engagement often involves suffering. In fact our political involvement often is born of suffering. But the joy is knowing and deciding that we can do something about it, it is recognizing that we share our pain with other people, is feeling the solidarity of those around us. Militants in Argentina speak of  “politicizing our sadness.”

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. Again, what we do may lead to suffering, but this may be preferable to the kind of self-destruction we would have faced had we remained inactive.

The inability to make politics a rewarding experience is part of the reason why, I think, the radical Left has been unsuccessful in attracting large numbers of people. Here too we are beginning to learn however. I see that many young militants today are recognizing the importance of building community, of organizing activities that are pleasurable, that build trust and affective relations, like eating together for instance. It is not an accident that Indigenous peoples’ movements in Latin America give so much importance to the organization of events like the fiestas.

Nick and carla: We wanted to ask you specifically about the feminist movement and what are some of the ways that feminists and other movements have struggled with sad militancy in the past. We’re thinking of Jo Freeman’s essay on “trashing” from the ‘70s, where she talks about real tendencies to destroy relationships within the feminist movement.[i] In one of the interviews that you’ve done, you mention “truculent forms of behavior that were typical of the movement in the ‘60s” and that you see new forms of kindness and care emerging that maybe were absent back then. So we wanted to ask you about how things have changed from your perspective, and whether you see a connection between trashing and what is now called call-out culture in contemporary movements.

Federici: When I wrote about truculent behavior, I was thinking of relations in the male Left and male-dominated organizations, where you found a lot of protagonism and peacock-like competition, as well as a manipulation of women, sexual and otherwise. These were among the factors that motivated the rise of the women’s liberation movement. Not only women’s demands were pushed off the agenda, but everyday relations were often degrading for them.

A good description of women’s lives in male-dominated organizations is Marge Piercy’s “The Grand Coolie Dam,”[ii] where she powerfully describes the many forms of subordination women suffered in male-dominated groups. In comparison, the organizational forms the women’s movement adopted were a major improvement. Possibly feminists moved too far in the opposite direction. I am thinking of Jo Freeman’s critique of the “tyranny of structurelessness.”[iii] But she’s excessively critical of the feminist movement. I don’t agree that feminists were especially prone to trashing each other. The attack on leadership, for instance, though it often worked against people’s capacity to express themselves, also opened the way to more egalitarian relations—like ensuring that everyone would have a change to speak in a meeting. The resistence against women getting credit for authoring articles or speaking too much in public was a legacy of the experiences we had made in male-dominated organizations. In time, it is a fear that most women left behind, as they felt more confident in their own powers.

Some of the bitterness that you find in Jo Freeman comes perhaps from the fact that, when we joined the women’s movement, many of us believed that we had reached a sort of paradise. As I wrote in “Putting Feminism On Its Feet,” when I began to work with other women I truly felt that I had found my home, my tribe.[iv] We thought that we had reached a place where everything would be harmonious; where there would be love, care, reciprocity, equality, cooperation—sisterhood as we called it. So we dis-activated our critical thinking and left our defenses down. Unfortunately, we didn’t reach paradise, and the disappointment was especially severe because we assumed that in the women’s movement we would find happiness, or at least we would not encounter the kind of jealousies, power plays, and power relations we had experienced with men.

Spinoza speaks of Joy as coming from Reason and Understanding. But we forgot that all of us bear on our bodies and minds the marks of life in a capitalist society. We forgot that we came to the feminist movement with many scars and fears. We would feel devalued and easily take offense if we thought we were not properly valued. It was a jealousy that came from poverty, from fear of not being given our due. This also led some women to be possessive about what they had done, what they had written or said.

These are all the classical problems and distortions that life in a capitalist society creates. Over time you learn to identify them, but at first, many of us were devastated by them. For me coping with this realization has been an important learning process. But I have also seen women leaving the movement because they were so deeply hurt by it.

On the other hand, the feminist movement, because it stressed the importance of sharing experiences and engaging in a collective examination of our everyday lives and problems, gave us important tools to deal with this situation. Through “consciousness-raising” and the refusal to separate politics from our everyday reproduction it created forms of organization that built trust and showed that our strength was rooted in our mutual solidarity.

I found a vision in the women’s movement that allowed me to overcome some bitter experiences and over time insulated me from disappointment. I see politics now as a process of transformation; a process by which we learn to better ourselves, shed our possessiveness and discard the petty squabbles that so much poison our lives.

I think that this has been a collective experience that has left a mark on other organizations as well. It seems to me that, over the last two or three decades, the women’s movement has been the most important influence on the organizational forms of most radical movements. You don’t find today, on a general level, the kind of behavior that was common among men thirty or forty years ago, not at least among the new generations, although there is still a good amount of machismo around. But you also have men who genuinely want to be feminist, and define themselves as anti-patriarchal, or organize against male supremacy—all unthinkable stands—with few exceptions—in the ‘60s.

carla: I have all these questions! There seems to be some kind of paradox in this: that joy is about feelings and relationships, but not just an individual feeling. And while we want to speak to the power of joy, it can’t be turned into a commandment, and in fact it gets lost when it becomes something imposed on people. But it also can’t be about just feeling happy or feeling good, or being okay with the way things are. It feels like a little bit of a paradox and I haven’t figured out how to think that through. A lot of my activism over the years has been around youth liberation and working with children having more of a say, and getting that form of oppression into the discussion and into activist spaces, and my work was very centered around that in a public way. I don’t want to replicate individualism in liberation; I want it to always be connected to the larger systems and social struggles. But it also needs to be about thriving right now, because they’re kids! And when things were working well it seemed that there was a lot of room for freedom and growth but it was held and felt collectively, without a bunch of rules or norms. There was happiness, sure, but also difficulty and a willingness to work through it. So it feels like a constant paradox to work through joy …

Federici: I like the distinction between happiness and joy. Like you, I like joy because it is an active passion. It’s not a static state of being. And it’s not satisfaction with things as they are. It’s part of feeling powers and capacities growing within yourself and in the people around you. It’s a feeling, a passion, that comes from a process of transformation and growth. It does not mean that you’re satisfied with your situation. It means, again using Spinoza, that you’re active in accordance to what your understanding tells you to do and what is required by the situation. So you feel that you have the power to change and feel yourself changing through what you’re doing, together with other people. It’s not a form of acquiescence to what exists.

Nick and carla: We’ve found your concept of the accumulation of divisions really compelling, and the ways you’re centering how capitalism is always using white supremacy, patriarchy, colonization, and other oppressive hierarchies to create divisions and enable exploitation. Your historicization of those divisions is powerful, because you show how the state and capitalism have deepened and entrenched patriarchy and racism as a strategy to stop resistance and enable more intense exploitation. And for us, in this book we really want to center the importance of rebuilding trust and connection and solidarity across those divisions, while leaving space for difference and autonomy. One of the things that we like about your work is that you don’t jump to a simple unity—that overcoming these divisions doesn’t look like a simple unity. And so we wanted to ask you to talk about that a little more. Is there a distinction between divisions, which are hierarchical and exploitative, and differences, which might be something else? And can you talk about the positive horizon you see for resisting the accumulation of divisions while warding off a kind of homogenizing unity?

Federici: Yes, the distinction between differences and divisions is important. When I speak of “divisions” I speak of differences that carry hierarchies, inequalities, and have a divisive power. So, we need to be very clear when we speak of “differences.” Not all should be celebrated.

The lesson we learned in the ‘60s from the women’s movement and the Black Power movement is that the most effective way to respond to unequal relations is for those who have less social power to organize autonomously. This does not exclude the possibility of coming together for particular struggles. But in a society divided along racial and gender lines, unity is a goal to be achieved, not something that can be assumed to already exist. Organizational autonomy, or at least the construction of autonomous spaces within mixed organizations—as it often happens in Latin America—is a necessary condition to subvert these divisions. The women’s movement could not have developed the understanding of the situation of women that it developed if women had remained in male-dominated organizations. It was crucial for women to move away from these organizations to even begin to think about their problems and share their thoughts with each other.

You cannot think of a problem, give voice to it, share it with others, if you fear that you will be dismissed, ridiculed, or told that it is not important. Moreover, how could women have spoken of sexuality and their relations with men in front of them? And how could Black militants speak openly of their experience of racism in front of white people?

Autonomy within movements that are working toward unity but are traversed by power relations is fundamental. A crucial reality would have remained hidden if the feminist movement had not organized autonomously and this is also true of the Black Power movement. Important areas and forms of exploitation would have continued to be unnoticed; would not have been analyzed and denounced and would have continued to be reproduced.

carla and Nick: You often point to Latin America and other places where the social fabric is much stronger in general, and movements are a lot more capable of reproducing themselves and meeting their own needs, relying less on the state and capital. The maintenance of communal and cooperative forms of life seems to be central to the capacity for sustained struggle and resistance. Can you elaborate on all this?

Federici: I went to Nigeria in the ‘80s and one of the big surprises for me was to discover that large amounts of land were still managed communally. That doesn’t mean that in communal land regimes relationships are necessarily egalitarian. Generally men have more power than women; but until recently they could not sell the land. Clearly these communal regimes have gone through many changes, especially because of colonial domination. But the fact that communal ownership has been widespread in Africa until at least the nineteenth century and, in some regions, continues even today, has had a deep impact on relationships and people, which is why I believe so much violence has been and is necessary to privatize the land and the continent’s immense natural resources.

It’s the same thing in Latin America. In Mexico, in the 1930s, during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, some land was returned to indigenous communities that had been expropriated by colonial invasion. Today the Mexican government is trying to re-privatize everything, but until recently at least thirty percent of the country’s land was still held communally.

Again, this is not a guarantee of egalitarian relations. Women in these communities are coming forward, criticizing the patriarchal relations often prevailing within them. A good example are the Zapatista women. As you can read in Hilary Klein’s book Compañeras, many of the transformations that have taken place in Zapatista communities, like the application of the Revolutionary Law On Women, have been the product of the struggle that women have made against patriarchalism. But communal land regimes guarantee the reproduction of the communities that live on the land.

Today many of these communities are facing dispossession because of land privatization, deforestation, the loss of water to irrigate their milpas. But when they are forced out and come to the cities, they still act as a collectivity. They take over land though collective action, they build encampments, and take decision collectively. As a result, in many cities of Latin America, new communities have formed that from their beginning were built collectively. It appears that the narcos now try to infiltrate some of these communities. But when people take over the land and cooperate to build their houses, to build the streets, to fight with the government to connect the electricity and get water pipes, there is a good chance that that they will be able to respond to this threat, and you can see that there’s a new social reality emerging in these communities.

As Raúl Zibechi often points out, something new is emerging in these communities because they have had to invent new forms of life, without any pre-existing model, and politicize the everyday process of their reproduction.[v] When you work together, building houses, building streets, building structures that provide some immediate form of healthcare—just to give some examples—you are making life-choices, as all of them come with a high cost. You must fight the state, fight the police, the local authorities. So you have to develop tight relations with each other and always measure the value of all things.

Nick and carla: Following up on that, part of what we are curious about is how we can learn from places where, in general, the degree of politicization is higher and the social fabric is much stronger. What kind of lessons can North American–based organizers draw from this for organizing in our own communities? How can people in the global North learn from all of the vibrant struggles and forms of life in Latin America while being attentive to differences in context at the same time?

Federici: This is a discussion that is taking place in New York. People in the social movements who are inspired by the struggles in Latin America are now thinking in terms of territorial politics, the territory being a place where you have some form of collective control and even self-government. Clearly, the situation in the US is profoundly different. But thinking in terms of territory enables us to see that the neighborhoods in which we live are not neutral spaces, they are not just conglomerates of houses and people. They are very politically structured. In New York, for instance, since the ‘70s, there’s been a process of “spatial de-concentration,” whereby every neighborhood has been studied by local and federal authorities to figure out how to better control the movement of people and guarantee that the wrong people do not go to certain neighborhoods. Subway lines, bus lines, playgrounds have been restructured, to make sure that poor people cannot easily go to places of wealth.

So looking at our neighborhoods as “territories” in this case means recognizing those factors of tension, of crisis, those power relations that traverse them that divide people but can also bring them together. The social centers that have opened in recent years in New York are attempting to do that, trying to engage in practices that create “territory,” that is, create forms of aggregation. Building more collective forms of reproduction is a key aspect of this process. It is indispensable if we want to create “communities of resistance,” spaces where people are connected and can engage in some collective decision-making.

carla and Nick: Maybe one thing to follow up on this. In that question you talked about the forgotten impacts of really subtle things like architecture, planning, and in Caliban and the Witch you talk about the forgotten impacts of the witch hunts, and how those impacts are still with us today. Are there underappreciated movements of joy and transformation where we haven’t fully appreciated the impacts?

Federici: There are so many movements. The Suffragette movement, for example, is always portrayed as a bourgeois movement, but I’m discovering that it had a working-class dimension as well. But rather than thinking of particular movements, what most matters is discovering and recreating the collective memory of past struggles. In the US there is a systematic attempt to destroy this memory and now this is extending across the world, with the destruction of the main historical centers of the Middle East—a form of dispossession that has major consequences and yet is rarely discussed. Reviving the memory of the struggles of the past makes us feel part of something larger than our individual lives and in this way it gives a new meaning to what we are doing and gives us courage, because it makes us less afraid of what can happen to us individually.

Nick and carla: Another thing that we wanted to talk to you about is the style and tone of intellectual engagement. Your style is so generous, and you have a really militant critique of capitalism, but you’re always pointing to examples in a range of different movements and you seem to reserve really pointed attacks for large destructive institutions like the World Bank. It seems to us that this differs from a lot of radical critique today, which can be very focused on exposing complicities or limitations, talking about the ways that movements are lacking, that they haven’t yet reached this or that, as well as targeting individuals. So we wanted to ask: Is this style something that you’ve cultivated and that you’re intentional about, and maybe more generally, can you talk about the potential of theory in intellectual work today, and what joyful theory might look like? What makes theory enabling and transformative, and what gets in the way of that?

Federici: It’s partially a consequence of growing old. You understand things that when you’re younger you didn’t see. One thing that I’ve learned is to be more humble and to hold my judgment of people until I know them beyond what I can make out from what they say, realizing that people often say foolish things that they do not really believe or have not seriously thought about.

It also comes from recognizing that we can change, which means that we should stress our potential rather than our limits. One of the most amazing experiences in the women’s movement was to see how much we could grow, learning to speak in public, write poetry, make beautiful posters. All this has given me a strong distaste for the impulse to squash everything at the first sign that something is not right.

I’ve made it a principle not to indulge in speech that is destructive. Striving to speak clearly, not to make people feel like fools because they don’t understand what I say, is a good part of it. That’s also something I’ve taken from the women’s movement. So many times we had felt humiliated, being in situations where we didn’t understand what men had said, and didn’t have the courage to ask what they meant. I don’t want to make other people ever feel this way.

carla and Nick: You’re really good at that! One of the things we were talking about this morning is the question of identity and a lot of the critiques of sad militancy that we have read really make identity into the problem quite a bit more than we would want to. We’re trying to think through how to speak to the power of identity and experience while also pointing to power of transformation and working across difference, and how the two of those aren’t antithetical in the way they’re sometimes set up, that they’re crucial for each other.

Federici: I think the critique of identity has taken on dimensions that are not always justified. What people often criticize as identity is actually the position that a person has had in the capitalist organization of work. For example, is being a housewife an identity? Yes, it’s an identity, but it is also a particular place in the capitalist organization of work, like being a miner, it’s also a particular form of exploitation. Identity is often used in a way that hides that exploitation. That’s when it becomes problematic.

Moreover, behind identity there’s also a history of struggle and resistance to exploitation. Identity can be a signpost for a whole history of struggle. When I say I am a feminist, for instance, I consciously connect myself to history of struggle that women have made. Identities can be mutable as well. “Woman,” for example, is not a fixed identity. The concept of woman has undergone a tremendous change over the last fifty years.

The problem has been the wedding of “identity” with the politics of rights, as when we speak of women’s rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, as if each group were entitled to a packet of entitlements, but in isolation from each other, so that we lose sight of the commonalities and the possibility of a common struggle.

Nick and carla: That’s really helpful. Our last question is about hope. Spinoza himself is pretty wary of hope, but he sees it as quite future-oriented: to hope is also to fear, because you’re attached to a future object or outcome. More generally hope is often equated with a naïve optimism: it can become fixated on a certain outcome. But in one of your interviews,[vi] you talked about it as something that’s a lot more open-ended. It’s more the sense that we can do something. Do you think that hope is necessarily attached to a vision of the future?

Federici: Hope is positive if it is an active passion; but only if it does not replace the work necessary to make our action successful.

**

Silvia Federici is an Italian activist and author of many works, including Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective and organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign in the ‘70s. She was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.

[1] Note: when we interviewed Silvia Federici, we were still using the phrase “sad militancy” in place of “rigid radicalism.” The original terminology is retained throughout.

[i] Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” JoFreeman.com, n.d., http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.

[ii] Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Dam,” (Boston: New England Free Press, 1969).

[iii] See Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Ms. Magazine, July 1973.

[iv] Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet,” Social Text 9/10 (1984), 338–46.

[v] See Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2010); Zibechi, Territories in Resistance.

[vi] Silvia Federici, “Losing the sense that we can do something is the worst thing that can happen,” interview by Candida Hadley, Halifax Media Co-op, November 5, 2013, http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/audio/losing-sense-we-can-do-something-worst-thing-can-h/19601.

Lead image of Silvia Federici by Luis Nieto Dickens

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

The post Feeling Powers Growing: An Interview with Silvia Federici appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This interview with Gustavo Esteva was conducted in 2014 by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery for Joyful Militancy. For this email interview we (Nick and carla) sent a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind our book project, and then included a series of questions based on Esteva’s other writings. As time went on in the process of researching, doing interviews, and writing the book, our ideas and articulations shifted, and for that, we are deeply indebted to all our interviewees who offered new insights and shed light on areas that needed reworking.

Consider joining the collective of supporters for Gustavo Esteva: For decades, Esteva has been supporting grassroots movements and initiatives; however, he recently lost his main source of income. At the age of 81, he has no savings or pension and is facing some very large medical bills. Many of us have experienced his hospitality, the grace with which he offers his time and wisdom, and the deep love and support he provides to his friends, family, and fellow-travellers. Please consider sharing or donating to this Fundly page on a monthly or a one-time basis.

carla & Nick (c&N): What is your initial reaction to the preamble on joyful militancy: how did it feel?  What resonated, and what didn’t?  Are there particular pieces that make you curious?  Excited?  Annoyed?

Esteva: It feels great! I am excited and curious about the whole thing, the approach, which clearly resonated with my theory and practice.

Your distinction between joy and sadness is obviously rooted in an old tradition but presented in a new way, more clear, more open, and you escape immediately from the temptation of a binary separation. I can associate the proposal and many specific statements with my own experience.

We have been using in recent years a word in Spanish that does not function in English: sentipensar. What is behind the word is that you can not think without feeling or feel without thinking…but there is a dominant, absurd conviction that you can and must separate thinking and feeling, and you can thus get “scientific thinking”, “objective thinking”, etc. supposedly separated from any subjectivity and feeling and consequently more valid. I feel a profound connection between our sentipensar and your concepts of joyful militancy and sad militancy.

There is a serious challenge in the proposal: how to assume it and apply it without falling into sadness, i.e. classifying, excluding, disqualifying? Yes, the idea is to live in “a truly radical, creative, and joyful way”. In that expression, are we not disqualifying the “other” ways, which will not be “truly” radical? We need to be very careful to say what we want to say.

And I have a problem with the words “activist” and “militancy”…which we cannot cease to use!

1. On the one hand, the military implication: an activist is “an individual who favors, incites or demands intensified activities, especially in time of war” (Webster). On the other hand, the role assumed by the activist as a “leader”. An activist is a person activating others. This may imply that you think that the others, the people, are not active; we need to activate them. This is usually wrong: the people are always doing something, they are moving. Or, even worse, you think that the people are moving but in the wrong direction and you know the right direction. You thus try to activate them in the right direction. A kind of vanguard, again.
2. Militancy cannot be delinked from war, the military. Militant is: “1. Fighting; engaged in war; serving as a soldier. 2. Of a combative or warlike character or disposition; ready and willing to fight.” Militancy is “fighting spirit, attitude or policy” (Webster).

True, we are involved in a war. The powers that be are waging a war in which we, the people, are the identified enemy. We are in what the Zapatistas called the Fourth World War. Are we engaged in it, serving as soldiers in such a war, in one of the sides? “Choose well your enemy,” says an old Arab proverb; “you will be like him.” If our enemy is an army, you will become an army…

Some of us (activists, militants) have suffered the urgency and the compulsion to do something against those oppressing us (“the dominant order”) and for a decent society, a different kind of world. For many of us, it is almost impossible to resist this impulse…and we don’t want to resist it: we feel that it makes us human and protects our dignity. But very often this impulse shapes us as sad militants and destroys the joy of being alive and thus fighting (to fight is to dream).

In my case, after a long, solid period of sad militancy, the path to escape from that condition was three-fold:

1. My experience at the grassroots. Unable to understand what I was seeing and experiencing at the grassroots with the lens, the categories, in which I was educated, I took off one day those lenses and began to see and experience a whole new world, full of joy, creativity, and conviviality.
2. My late discovery of the Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Deleuze and Guattari, and particularly its preface by Michel Foucault opened my heart. For Foucault the book poses some of the questions implicit in your presentation: “How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order? Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica.” It was not easy to read the book itself; perhaps it is too French, and too located in a specific intellectual context of certain time and place. But it is fascinating and useful. As Foucault clarifies in the preface, the book combats three adversaries: the sad militant, the technicians of desire (psychoanalysts and semiologists), and fascism, particularly “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” And he states, firmly: “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.”
3. The most important, what seems to be the most radical sentence of the Zapatistas: “We are quite ordinary women and men, children and old people, that is to say, rebels, non-conformists, uncomfortable, dreamers.” (La Jornada, 4 August 1999). With the Zapatistas we learned to be activated by ordinary men and women and accepted their leadership…instead of trying to lead them, as activists, organizers, etc. And we learned with them, with the people, how to transform our militancy into a joyful, peaceful struggle. This was probably the “final” cure (I hope) from the Leninism guiding my political activities and in fact my whole life until the mid-80s but still surreptitiously present in the 90s.

c&N: How did you come to grapple with sad/joyful militancy: i.e. how did it emerge as something you’re oriented towards (how’d you get here?)

Esteva: As most things in my life, I got ‘there’ through practice, experience.

In the 60s, when I became associated with a group in the process of organizing a guerrilla in Mexico, whose members were assuming that they were already the vanguard of the proletariat because they had the revolutionary program, I was fully immersed in what we now call sad militancy. Our ‘program’ was evidently an intellectual construction in the Leninist tradition. We had already our criticism of Stalinism, etc. but we still were in the tradition of trying to seize the power of the state for a revolution from the top-down, through social engineering. We were thus preparing ourselves (military training, etc.) and organizing. I can apply to the experience your description: “perfectionism, suspicion, cynicism, fear, ideological purity, competition, race to radicalism, fear of mistakes/humiliation, self-hatred…” Of course, as you observe, there were moments or conditions of joy, laughter, intensified emotion, exhilaration… The environment of conspiracy and clandestinity and the shared ideology shaped real camaraderie and episodes full of joy, but it was clear that the experience itself was pure sad militancy: “creating boundaries, making distinctions, comparing, making plans, and so on.” One day I will share many stories of that phase of my life that illustrate this very well. How the whole experience ended makes the point better than any of those stories: one of our leaders killed the other leader because of a woman. The episode evidenced for us the kind of violence we were accumulating in ourselves and wanted to impose on the whole society. In the military training, for an army or a guerrilla, to learn how to use a weapon is pretty easy; what is difficult is to learn to kill someone in cold blood, someone like you, that did nothing personal against you… Nothing sadder than that.

The joy of living, the passion for fiestas, the capacity to express emotions, the social climate that I found at the grassroots, in villages and barrios, in the midst of extreme misery, began to change my attitudes. My participation in different kinds of peasant and urban marginal movements gave me a radically different approach. The break point was perhaps the explosion of autonomy and self-organization after the earthquake in Mexico City in 1985. It became for me a life-changing experience. The victims of the earthquake were suffering all kind of hardships. They had lost friends and relatives, their homes, their possessions, almost everything. Their convivial reconstruction of their lives and culture would not have been possible without the amazing passion for living they showed at every moment. Such passion had very powerful political expressions and was the seed for amazing social movements. In the following years the balance of forces changed in Mexico City, already a monstrous settlement of 15 million people. There was a radical contrast between the guerrilla and these movements. The very notion of militancy changed in me: it was no longer associated with an organization, a party, an ideology, and even less a war… It was an act of love.

c&N: What’s been your experience of sad militancy in everyday life—and especially in radical spaces?

Esteva: In the 60s, in the preparation of our guerrilla, an important aspect of our training was to bring our ideological commitment and the principles of our training as would-be guerrillas to our daily lives. This attitude brought coldness, separation, sadness…

Emma Goldman expressed this in a beautiful way:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”

One very important point is that in the practice of sad militancy it is almost unavoidable to fall in love with power. You are trying to seize it –from the State- or to create your own power, “people’s power”, “popular power”. And this obsession, this fascism, is applied to the life in the family, with friends, with every one. It is one that very radical and progressive men can be feudal at home, in their attitudes with their wifes and children. Machismo is everywhere in sad militancy.

c&N: What sustains sad militancy?

Esteva: Dogmatism, even fundamentalism, the strong conviction that you own the truth,  objective truth, scientific truth – and that theory guides practice: you must obey your theory, the program, the ideas…

c&N: What provokes or inspires it?  What makes it spread?

Esteva: The separation of means and ends. The joy is projected to the future –the promised land, the new society- and all kinds of means are accepted for your high ideals, means that can be very sad and terrible: killing, betraying, oppressing… This is very serious business and you must commit all your effort, energy, feelings, connections, etc. to the revolutionary goal, subordinating to it every minute, every emotion, every love…

This is contagious. Of course, there is a kind of exhilaration in this attitude: you are saving the world, you are fighting against the identified enemy, you are offering the sacrifice of your life for the common good, etc. etc. But you can commit the worst crimes and be very sad in this endeavor.

c&N: What’s been your experience of joyful militancy? can you speak to the Zapatistas and the use of this tactic?

Esteva: The Zapatistas are of course a perfect illustration for the alternative attitude.

In a letter to the Argentinian people in 2003 subcomandante Marcos wrote:

…sometimes you forget the points and lines that in the maps mark frontiers… All scientists know that music, dance, food and feeling are fundamental ingredients to construct what some call utopia, but is possible and necessary: a new world, that is, better. Here in Mexico, a place of transgressors of oblivion, and professionals of hope, there are some human beings who have decided to keep awake the powerful organizing a fiesta that some disoriented call an uprising and is nothing but the common dance of dignity. The dance in which the human being is, and is human.”

In a letter to Eric Jauffret, on July 5, 1995, subcomandante Marcos wrote:

We are not fighting with our weapons. Our example and our dignity now fight for us. In the peace talks the government delegates have confessed that they have studied in order to learn about dignity and that they have been unable to understand it. They ask the Zapatista delegates to explain what is dignity. The Zapatistas laugh, after months of pain they laugh. Their laughter echoes and escapes unto the high wall behind which arrogance hides its fear. The Zapatista delegates laugh even when the dialogue ends, and they are giving their report. Everyone who hears them laughs, and the laughter re-arranges faces which have been hardened by hunger and betrayal. The Zapatistas laugh in the mountains of the Mexican southeast and the sky cannot avoid infection by that laughter and the peals of laughter emerge. The laughter is so great that tears arise and it begins to rain as though the laughter were a gift for the dry land…With so much laughter raining, who can lose? Who deserves to lose?

In December 2007, in their intervention in the symposium to honor Andrés Aubry, subcomandante Marcos shared that a young woman told him a few years before: “If your revolution does not know how to dance, don’t invite me to your revolution”. This is probably a variant of a statement commonly attributed to Emma Goldman that occurs in several variants: If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!; If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution!; If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution; A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having; If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.

No quote, however, can illustrate the character of Zapatismo as joyous militancy better that the daily life in Zapatista communities. Yes, you have the amazing sense of humour of subcomandante Marcos and many comandantes and comandantas. But there is nothing like the joy and freedom of the children in Zapatista communities. The Zapatistas work a lot, very day, and they are dealing with all kinds of hardships, restrictions and aggressions. They have real motives to be sad. And they know how and when to cry. But they laugh all the time and they have wide spaces for creativity, hospitality, love. There is no event without a fiesta. They have created a convivial society, perhaps the first.

We use the word aesthetic to allude to the ideal of beauty. The etymological meaning, almost lost, associate the word with the intensity of sensual experience, it meanse perceptive, sharp in the senses. That meaning is retained in words like anesthesia. Comparing a funeral in a modern, middle class family and in a village in Mexico or India, we can see then contrast in how you express or not your feelings and how joy and sadness can be combined with great intensity.

Zapatismo is clearly an aesthetic movement, both for its beauty and the intensity of the senses in it.

c&N: What inspires/encourages/sustains joyful militancy?

Esteva: Again, one important lesson from the Zapatistas. If you are not separating means and ends, your struggle embodies and takes the shape of the outcome. If you are looking for a society without violence, you are not using violence in the struggle. Joy, love, kindness, everything that you want in the decent society you are tying to create, appear in the militancy, in the real, immediate actions of the struggle.

c&N: How do you try to embody it?

Esteva: Gandhi said this beautifully: Be the change you wish for the world. Instead of preaching, telling everyone what to do, qualifying and disqualifying everyone, focusing your effort and energy in identifying the ‘enemy’ and fighting against it, I try to do the kind of things in which I believe and to embody, in my daily live, the attitudes and practices of the new society as I imagine it.

For a long time now, I have been try to apply in my daily life Paul Goodman’s advice:

Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!

c&N: Because we think joy and sadness are always moving and shifting into new configurations, we are really curious about how these shifts take place.  Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift from joyful militancy into sad militancy, or vice-versa?  What leads to these shifts?

Esteva: Yes, continually, day after day and almost hour after hour, in the Oaxaca Commune, our experience in 2006. Our movement evolved in a continual confrontation between the people themselves, self-organized and autonomous groups, and a variety of organizations of a vertical structure—unions,  “vanguards”, etc. —most of which can be typically described as sad militancy. There was a continual fluctuation and shifting. I do think that the main factor producing the shifts to sad militancy was power, the struggle for power, the way in which many militants were mirroring the power we were fighting against in what they saw as the construction of “popular power”. Such struggle was often projected inside the movement, when the militants were competing for power and transforming their comrades into enemies as an expression of rivalry. In the same way, the shift to joyous militancy came from the creativity and joy of the people themselves. In the radio we controlled, we had a very popular program: “Barricade love,” beautiful love stories emerging during the nights in the barricade, when young people were preparing themselves to defend the neighborhood from the police and the governor’s goons. A lot of ingenuity and creativity emerging from the people became a limit to the actions imposed by sad militants.

c&N: A common perception we’ve been grappling with is that joyful militancy is naïve—a failure to appreciate how bad things are (if you’re not sad/angry/cynical, you’re not paying attention) – how do you react to this?

Esteva: There is a point in the critique: we need to be continually aware of the horror, not to hide it…as the ‘system’ does. Reaction: irony, laughter, ridiculization… When Galeano states: “Who is not afraid of hunger, is afraid of food” and I comment this statement saying: “We cannot expect a moral epiphany in the CEOs of Monsanto and WalMart,” we are combining the awareness of the horror, paying attention to it, with the joy of laughing at them and doing our own thing.

c&N: There’s also a perception that joyful militancy is just a symptom of privilege (in the north American context). How do you think about joyful militancy in the context of privilege and oppression?

Esteva: My feeling is that such perception is a prejudice. The poor and oppressed should be sad. I did learn sad militancy with highly educated people, middle-class professionals and so on. I did learn joyful militancy with urban marginal, peasants and particularly indigenous peoples – under extreme oppression and misery.

c&N: How do you think about joyful militancy across divides of colonialism, ageism, heteropatriarchy, racism, ableism, etc?

Esteva: It is what may erase those divides! It is the way out!

At the end of the interview, Esteva included some pertinent quotes from other authors:

Radicalism is not “a certain set of ideas, but rather an attitude, an approach”, doubting everything, “readiness and capacity for critical questioning of all assumptions and institutions which have become idols under the name of common sense, logic and what is supposed to be natural…Radical doubt as a process of liberation from idolatrous thinking; a widening of awareness, of imaginative, creative vision of our possibilities and options… The radical approach…starts from the roots”, i.e., man, “but we speak of man as a process;…of his potential for developing all his powers; those for greater intensity of being, greater harmony, greater love, greater awareness. We also speak of man with a potential to be corrupted of his power to act being transformed into the passion for power over others, of his love of live degenerating into the passion to destroy life (“Introduction,” by Erich Fromm, in Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness, London: Marion Boyars, 1972, pp.7-9).

“This call to face facts, rather than deal in illusions-to live change, rather than rely on engineering-is an attempt to re-introduce the word ‘celebration’ into ordinary English… To discover…what we must do to use mankind’s power to create the humanity, the dignity and the joyfulness of each one of us” (“A Call to Celebration” in Illich, Celebration of Awareness, p.14-5)

In English ‘convivial’ now seeks the company of tipsy jolliness, which is distinct from that indicated by the OED and opposite to the austere meaning of modern ‘eutrapelia’ which I intend. (OED: Of or belonging to a feast or banquet; feasting or jovial companionship; fond of feasting and good company; disposed to enjoy festive society; festive; jovial)… ’Austerity’ has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle and Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship… Thomas deals with disciplined and creative playfulness…a virtue that does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those that are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas ‘austerity’ is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations. (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, New York/Evanston/San Francisco/London: Harper & Row, 1973, pp, xxiv-xxv).

From Michel Foucault’s Preface to Anti-Oedipus:

Whence the three adversaries confronted by Anti-Oedipus. Three adversaries who do not have the same strength, who represent varying degrees of danger, and whom the book combats in different ways:

1. The political ascetics, the sad militant, the terrorists of theory, those who would preserve the pure order of politics and political discourse. Bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth.
2. The poor technicians of desire — psychoanalysts and semiologists of every sign and symptom — who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack.
3. Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism (whereas Anti-Oedipus’ opposition to the others is more of a tactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini — which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively — but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular “readership”: being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.

Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.

This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide for everyday life:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

• Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.

• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

• Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

• Do not become enamored of power.

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

Image of Gustavo Esteva from Joyful Threads on vimeo

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