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Review

Sad Comforts is a pamphlet comprising the final two chapters of carla bergman and Nick Montgomery's Joyful Militancy, published by Ill Will Editions in 2018. It is a clear-eyed, compassionate diagnosis of a phenomenon anyone who has spent time in activist or radical spaces will immediately recognize: the way movements meant to liberate can become suffocating from within.

The authors name this force "rigid radicalism" — the circulation of suspicion, self-righteousness, performance anxiety, and moralistic policing that saps radical spaces of their transformative potential. They are careful to note that rigid radicalism is not a group of people to be identified and expelled; it is more like a gas, working behind our backs, pulling us toward closures and hostilities even as we try to resist them. This framing is the pamphlet's greatest strength: it refuses the very logic of purification and blame that it critiques.

Drawing on Spinoza's distinction between joy (an increase in a body's capacity to affect and be affected) and sadness (its diminution), bergman and Montgomery trace rigid radicalism to three overlapping sources. The first is ideology — not merely Marxism-Leninism, but ideological thinking as such, the comfort of pre-existing answers that close off experimentation. They draw on the Weather Underground's descent into stifling orthodoxy and Gustavo Esteva's account of guerrilla organizing in Mexico to show how even revolutionary camaraderie can coexist with profound rigidity. The second source is morality, specifically a secularized Christian moralism that converts radical politics into an endless hunt for sinners and heretics. The third is what Eve Sedgwick calls "paranoid reading" — the schooling-induced habit of approaching everything through detached evaluation and lack-finding, where nothing is ever enough and celebration feels naive.

What saves the pamphlet from becoming another exercise in the very dynamics it names is its consistent turn toward affirmation. The authors do not merely diagnose; they populate the text with voices — Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Ashanti Alston, Walidah Imarisha, Kelsey Cham C., and others — who testify to the ways rigid radicalism is already being undone through trust, ethical attunement, and the slow, messy work of relating differently. Imarisha's account of celebrating a commuted death sentence in a prison yard is one of the most striking passages: joy and grief breathing together, irreducible to either optimism or despair.

The writing is accessible without being simplistic, and the interview format woven through the text gives it an almost conversational quality. The included glossary of Spinozan concepts (affect, common notions, joy, sadness, Empire) is genuinely useful and could stand alone as a primer. If there is a limitation, it is that the pamphlet's origins as extracted chapters occasionally make it feel like it is gesturing toward arguments developed more fully elsewhere. But as a standalone provocation, it is remarkably complete.

This is essential reading for anyone who has felt the stifling air of radical spaces — the anxiety of never being enough, the exhaustion masquerading as burnout, the way curiosity gets coded as naivety. bergman and Montgomery offer no cure, and they are honest about that. What they offer instead is permission to take joy seriously as a political force, and to approach the undoing of rigidity with the same care and gentleness they advocate for everything else.

Reviewed 2026-03-26

Notable Quotes

There is something that circulates in many radical spaces, movements, and milieus that saps their power from within. It is the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical enough; the sad comfort of sorting unfolding events into dead categories; the vigilant apprehension of errors and complicities in oneself and others.

Opening characterization of rigid radicalism, naming its core affective texture — rigid radicalism, anxiety, radical performance, self-surveillance

It can be risky to discuss all this publicly; there is always the chance that one will be cast as a liberal, an oppressor, or a reactionary.

The authors acknowledging the danger of naming rigid radicalism, which illustrates the very phenomenon they describe — silencing, fear, public secret, political risk

It is not that there are a bunch of assholes out there stifling movements and imploding worlds. In fact, this vigilant search for flawed people or behaviors—and the exposure of them everywhere—can be part of rigid radicalism itself.

Cautioning against converting the critique of rigid radicalism into another form of blame and purification — systemic vs individual, blame, self-referential critique

No one is immune to it, just as no one is immune to being pulled into liberalism and other patterns of Empire. The air makes us cough certainties.

The metaphor of rigid radicalism as polluted air that affects everyone — universality, Empire, certainty as symptom

In the paradigm of government, being a militant implies always being angry with what happens, because it is not what should happen; always chastising others, because they are not aware of what they should be aware of; always frustrated, because what exists is lacking in this or that.

Amador Fernández-Savater's concept of the paradigm of government, which the authors use to describe militant rigidity — paradigm of government, frustration, should vs is, militant affect

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.

Silvia Federici on how movements that demand self-denial produce depleted subjects — self-sacrifice, burnout, desire, sustainability

What depletes us is not just long hours, but the tendencies of shame, anxiety, mistrust, competition, and perfectionism. It is the way in which these tendencies stifle joy.

Reframing activist burnout as more than overwork — it is the affective toxicity of rigid radicalism — burnout, shame, joy, depletion

Joy has to do with a capacity for new encounters, to a disposition to new affects and ideas, with desiring differently, with setting into question the reproduction of things as they are. Sadness, on the contrary, has to do with fear of leaving the safety of a routine.

Sebastian Touza contrasting Spinozan joy and sadness through his experience in Argentina's student movement — joy, sadness, Spinoza, experimentation, routine

What happens when politics becomes something a person has, rather than something people do together, as a shared practice?

The authors questioning the common phrase 'having good politics' and its individualizing effects — politics as possession, individualism, collective practice

Even if one is unable to challenge capitalism and white supremacy as structures or to participate in transformative struggles, one can always attack others for being complicit with Empire and tell oneself that these attacks are radical in and of themselves.

On how the game of good politics substitutes interpersonal policing for structural change — displacement, lateral violence, radical performance, impotence

Weather succumbed to dogma, arrogance, and certainty. We were not alone. There was recovery, and amends that are still underway. But the perceived necessity to have answers to everything and to struggle endlessly resulted in ungenerous and damaging leadership, harm to great comrades, and wretched behaviour.

Former Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn reflecting on the group's ideological rigidity — Weather Underground, dogma, certainty, harm

It was fanatical obedience, we militant nonconformists suddenly tripping over one another to be exactly alike, following the sticky roles of congealed idealism. I cannot reproduce the stifling atmosphere that overpowered us.

Bill Ayers on the paradox of radical conformity within the Weather Underground — conformity, militant identity, stifling atmosphere, paradox

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.

Gustavo Esteva describing how encounters with grassroots movements in Mexico transformed his Leninist militancy — grassroots joy, transformation, conviviality, encounter

I came into these radical communities wanting to make change, but all my habits and the language I had learned to protect myself with got me in shit.

Kelsey Cham C. on being excluded from radical spaces despite being among the marginalized people those spaces claimed to center — exclusion, language policing, class, radical gatekeeping

Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories.

Asam Ahmad on how call-out culture reproduces carceral logic within movements — call-out culture, punishment, prison industrial complex, disposability

It isn't an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who's in and who's out.

Asam Ahmad on the boundary-policing function of radical language and terminology — totalitarianism, boundaries, language, progressive communities

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.

Silvia Federici on cultivating accessible, non-humiliating forms of intellectual engagement — clarity, humility, care, intellectual accessibility

It also comes from recognizing that we can change, which means that we should stress our potential rather than our limits.

Federici on why affirmative engagement is more transformative than critique-as-reflex — potential, change, affirmation, limits

In general, I think rigid radicalism is a response to feeling really hurt and fucked up. And the real enemy is the dominant order, but it gets mixed into this big soup, so the enemy becomes each other. It becomes oneself. It's a finding lacking as such.

Richard Day tracing rigid radicalism to pain and the displacement of anger onto fellow radicals — pain, displacement, lack-finding, self-destruction

So strangely enough I'd suggest that rigid radicalism is driven by a desire to heal. And it has exactly the opposite effect: of sundering the self more, of sundering communities more.

Richard Day on the tragic paradox at the heart of rigid radicalism — healing, paradox, destruction, desire

I got really good at that. I won all of the political arguments in school, but ... I was being a shitbag of a militant, tearing everyone down.

Mik Turje on mastering hypercritical discourse at the cost of relationships and solidarity — critique as weapon, university, winning vs building

If the hallmark of ideology is that it begins from an answer or a conceptual framework and attempts to work backward from there, then one way to resist ideology is to start from questions rather than answers.

Crimethinc on the political power of questions over conclusions — ideology, questions, openness, experimentation

We took over the prison yard, the supporters. Sprawled out on the grass. Screamed the good news into cell phones. Fell into each other's arms, laughing. Unable to give words to my feelings, I somersaulted across the prison lawn. It was the first time I ever felt truly joyous in a prison yard, without a sense of dread and sadness nestled underneath.

Walidah Imarisha celebrating the commutation of comrade Haramia's death sentence — joy inside the machinery of incarceration — joy, prison abolition, celebration, ambivalence, victory

In a society that fits everything into dichotomy, you win or you lose. There is no space for a win that is attached to a loss.

Imarisha on holding the ambivalence of a commuted death sentence — a man saved, others executed the same week — ambivalence, dichotomy, complexity, holding both

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone. It has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Ursula K. Le Guin quoted to illustrate that common notions — like love — must be continuously tended to remain alive — love, maintenance, common notions, renewal