Description:

Review

Sad Comforts is a pamphlet whose central act is naming. Ill Will Editions has carved out the last two chapters of carla bergman and Nick Montgomery's Joyful Militancy and reissued them as a slim standalone diagnostic — a small book whose ambition is to identify and dislodge an affective tendency the authors call rigid radicalism. The phrase is meant to do real work: to make visible a circulating disposition inside radical organizing that converts experimentation into certainty, sorts events into dead categories, and turns the labor of struggle into the labor of policing other militants. The pamphlet's most distinctive achievement is the sustained discipline with which it refuses to convert that diagnosis into a prescription. That refusal is also its sharpest limitation — what bergman and Montgomery gain in honesty about the recapture risk of their own analysis, they forfeit in traction. The pamphlet is acute and necessary; it is also a book that cannot quite tell you what to do with what it has shown you, and that incapacity is structural rather than incidental.

This is a republication, and the form matters. The original chapters belong to a longer argument; lifted out, they read as a focused intervention rather than a sweeping theory, and the Ill Will editorial framing presents them that way — closer to a movement document than a treatise. The Spinozan glossary appended to the pamphlet does a lot of quiet work, defining affect, common notions, conviviality, Empire, ethics, forms of life, joy, militancy, morality, sadness, and subjection in the specific senses the chapters use them. Without it, the Spinozan vocabulary that anchors the analysis — joy as increase in the capacity to affect and be affected, sadness as its reduction — would float free of the texture of the argument. With it, the pamphlet becomes legible as a piece of Spinozan ethics applied to anti-authoritarian organizing, which is exactly how it should be read.

Rigid radicalism, as bergman and Montgomery construct it, is not a faction or a tendency one can join or leave. It is closer to a weather pattern that any radical formation can develop. The opening lines of the first chapter announce it as a public secret:

There is something that circulates in many radical spaces, movements, and milieus that saps their power from within. It is the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical enough; the sad comfort of sorting unfolding events into dead categories; the vigilant apprehension of errors and complicities in oneself and others; the anxious posturing on social media with the highs of being liked and the lows of being ignored; the suspicion and resentment felt in the presence of something new; the way curiosity feels naïve and condescension feels right.

That paragraph is the pamphlet's load-bearing scene. Everything that follows is an attempt to specify the tendency it names without giving it a stable enough definition to be applied like a label. The definitional move is built on a pun: rigid radicalism is both a fixed way of being and a way of fixing — fixing in the sense of attempting to repair, of seeing emergent movements as inherently flawed and treating struggles as broken and insufficient, and fixing in the sense of fastening or making permanent, converting fluid practices into set ways of being and stagnating their transformative potential. The pun is more than wordplay. It links the affect of perpetual repair to the structural effect of immobilization, which is the connection the rest of the pamphlet keeps pulling on.

The first chapter's map of toxic contours is the most immediately recognizable section of the book. It draws heavily on Amador Fernández-Savater's paradigm of government — a stance in which being a militant implies always being angry with what happens, because it is not what should happen; always chastising others, because they are not aware of what they should be aware of; always frustrated, because what exists is lacking in this or that; always anxious, because the real is permanently headed in the wrong direction and you have to subdue it, direct it, straighten it. Pulled close to Silvia Federici's interview rejection of self-sacrifice as a movement ethic — she says directly that she does not believe in the concept of self-sacrifice, that doing things against our needs and potentials for the sake of political work has been a common practice in past movements and one that produces constantly dissatisfied individuals — the chapter argues that this stance is not a personal failing but a structural inheritance. Counterrevolution and Empire generate it; movements that survive their own defeats tend to calcify into it; new militants arriving at a scene learn it as the local idiom of seriousness.

The most barbed passage in the first chapter is its diagnosis of "having good politics," and the line that most clearly states the pamphlet's politics-of-attention runs like this: one's opponents in the game of good politics and rigid radicalism are not capitalists, nor white supremacists, nor police; they are others vying for the correct ways of thinking about and fighting capitalism, white supremacy, and policing. The argument bergman and Montgomery build out of this observation is not that intra-movement criticism is illegitimate. It is that an entire economy of micro-judgment has come to function as a substitute for action against external enemies, and that this economy generates the affective payoffs — the small pleasures of being right, the social-media highs and lows — that keep people locked inside it. The second chapter will name three inheritances that converge to produce the substitution.

The first genealogy is ideology, traced through Marxist-Leninist vanguardism and what Nick Thoburn calls the militant diagram. The chapter's center of gravity here is the Weather Underground, with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers testifying as ambivalent witnesses to their own group's collapse into Maoist self-criticism. Dohrn is unsparing: Weather succumbed to dogma, arrogance, and certainty, and 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. Thoburn's contribution — that as an organization constitutes itself as a unified body it tends to become closed to the outside, to the non-militant, those who would be the basis of any mass movement — provides the abstract diagram inside which the Weather story makes sense. The argument widens through Gustavo Esteva's break with Mexican Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organizing, Marina Sitrin's account of moving away from soul-deadening centrist socialist groups, Sebastian Touza on Argentine student movements calcifying into party-line certainty, and amory starr's coinage grumpywarriorcool, which names a specifically anarchist version of the same affect: anti-conformist individual-freedom posturing that reproduces whiteness and patriarchy and forecloses collective responsibility. Ashanti Alston and Richard Day are pulled in to argue for ethics over ideology, and the section closes with Crimethinc, quoted to the effect that if the hallmark of ideology is to begin from an answer or a conceptual framework and work backward, then one way to resist it is to start from questions rather than answers. The argument is honest about its own range — it is not that all organization is vanguardism, but that the vanguardist diagram is one of the most stable forms rigid radicalism takes, and that it persists well past the moment Bolshevism is supposed to have ended.

The second genealogy is moralism, and here the pamphlet leans hard on Nietzsche. The case is that secular radical morality is the latest mutation of a Christian inheritance whose deep structure is ressentiment, and that this inheritance shows up on both liberal and anti-liberal sides of contemporary politics. The most efficient line on this is one bergman and Montgomery write themselves: like the old Christian morality, new forms of moralism subsist on the evils they decry — to remain pious, the priest must reveal new sins. The argument is then turned on call-out culture through Asam Ahmad, who is quoted at length on the spectacle dimension of online accountability — that what makes call-out culture so toxic is not necessarily its frequency so much as the nature and performance of the call-out itself, where calling someone out on Twitter or Facebook is not a private interaction between two individuals but a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are. Kelsey Cham C. is invoked as a queer newcomer to radical Montreal whose testimony shows how language-policing excludes those it claims to protect, and Ngọc Loan Trần's "Calling IN" is offered as a less-disposable practice that does not foreclose accountability but reframes it. Chris Crass closes the loop with a line the pamphlet uses to keep the analysis on a class footing: the enemy is capitalism, not middle-class activists, and a middle-class orientation is not something only middle-class people can have — it is the orientation everyone non-ruling-class is raised to endlessly and exhaustingly strive for. The section is careful, as it should be from white authors writing on white anti-racism, to mark the limits of its own standing on this terrain, and it lands with the Le Guin line that love does not sit there like a stone but has to be made like bread, remade all the time, made new.

The third genealogy is the most original of the three and the most fragile. It borrows Eve Sedgwick's distinction between paranoid and reparative reading and re-roots paranoid reading in schooling — in the regime of evaluation that replaces curiosity with instruction, memorization, and hierarchical measurement, locks students in competition, and pathologizes those who resist as problem children needing medication or punishment. The claim is that adults trained inside this regime carry a lifelong reflex of evaluating everything against external standards, and that the reflex shows up in radical milieus as the search for inadequacy in oneself and others. The most affecting evidence comes from Margaret Killjoy and Mik Turje, who describe the way critique, once it becomes the dominant capacity in a scene, crowds out the capacity to embrace anything — Turje's self-description as having become a "shitbag of a militant" through immersion in critical theory is meant to land as both confession and warning. The chapter's most luminous moment is Walidah Imarisha's account of celebrating the commutation of Haramia KiNassor's death sentence in the same week other executions were going forward; the prison guards' inability to enforce the rules during that celebration becomes a concrete image of what it means to hold a win attached to a loss. The argument bergman and Montgomery build around this is summarized in Imarisha's own line that 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. Recovering that space, they argue, is the specific affective skill that paranoid reading destroys, and Federici's resolve not to indulge in destructive speech, to strive to speak clearly without making people feel like fools, is offered as one model of what an affirmative theoretical practice looks like in person.

The pamphlet does not resolve into a program, and this is the move that most divides readers. The authors are explicit that any prescription for undoing rigid radicalism will be recaptured as a new duty, that the critique of moralism can itself slide into moralism, and that the critique of paranoid reading can itself become a paranoid critique of paranoia. They warn, in their summative line on holding common notions open, that ethics and uncertainty cannot survive long in an atmosphere of stagnation and rigidity — detached from the transformative relationships that animate them, common notions become fixed principles dropped on other people's heads. The Le Guin epigraph and the Federici interviews are doing a lot of work as substitutes for instruction. The argument is that joy and conviviality are practices rather than positions, and that practices can be pointed at but not handed down. There is a real intellectual rigor to this. There is also, palpably, a worry that the book might be read as one more piece of equipment for the game of good politics — a worry that bends the prose toward gentleness at moments where a sharper claim would have helped.

Placed in its lineages, the pamphlet is recognizably anarchist in its emotional center of gravity and in its sources — Crimethinc, Ashanti Alston, Richard Day, Scott Crow, amory starr, the Crimethinc-adjacent affirmation of question-driven practice, Colectivo Situaciones on the militant who always sets out the party line, Emma Goldman scolded for dancing as the canonical anecdote about the long policing of joy. The real intellectual armature is a fusion of Spinozan materialism and post-structuralist critique. The Spinozan frame, drawn from the Ethics and inflected through contemporary readings, provides the joy/sadness distinction, the language of affect as capacity, and the concept of common notions that the pamphlet adapts as its alternative to ideology. The post-structuralist current arrives through Sedgwick on paranoid reading and through a Foucauldian, loosely held idea of subjection as productive power. The Tiqqun-derived terms Empire and forms of life run beneath the surface as the master categories that situate the contemporary tangle of habits, apparatuses, and affective subjections, and conviviality enters via Esteva's trajectory as the Illichian counterconcept to professionalized, NGO-mediated organizing. Nietzsche's diagnosis of ressentiment is doing more in the moralism chapter than its single citation suggests — the whole structure of the argument that anti-liberal morality must keep producing new sins to remain pious is a Nietzschean move translated into a contemporary register.

The cross-references the pamphlet's argument actually rests on are smaller and more deliberate than the list of names might suggest. Imarisha's Angels With Dirty Faces gives the Haramia KiNassor section its anchor. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven gives the moralism section its grace note. Trần's "Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable" is the practical concept the call-out chapter pivots on. Goldman's autobiography is the historical reach-back that keeps the diagnosis from looking like a complaint about a particular generation. The list of named ideological currents — Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Bolshevism, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers and Third World national liberation struggles as instances of the militant diagram, the Zapatistas and the Oaxaca uprisings as instances of convivial form — places the argument firmly within a contemporary anti-authoritarian conversation that runs from horizontalismo through prefigurative anarchism to anti-oppression organizing.

The weaknesses are real, and the pamphlet would be stronger if it stated them with the same clarity it brings to its critique of moralism. The three-genealogies argument is, by the authors' own implicit standard, speculative — it offers a satisfying explanation for why rigid radicalism keeps reappearing, but it does not test that explanation against cases where one or two of the inheritances are absent and the affect appears anyway, or against cases where all three are present and it does not. The critique of social-media spectacle is sharp behaviorally and tonally but it does not engage platform political economy at all; Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr function in the argument as engines of subjection without any account of why those engines are built the way they are, and the analysis would gain a lot if it could distinguish the platform-shaped components of rigid radicalism from the components platforms merely amplify. The class analysis runs through Crass and Cham C. but stops at the level of affective style — middle-class orientation as a structure of feeling — without pushing into the structural account of class composition that the materialist tradition the pamphlet draws on would license. The interview-and-essay methodology is candid about its own looseness, but a reader who wants to know whether Killjoy's or Turje's experience is representative of anarchist scenes, or whether the Weather Underground is a fair exemplar of the militant diagram rather than its limit case, has no way to find out from the pamphlet itself.

The hardest weakness to name is the one bergman and Montgomery have anticipated, which makes it both unavoidable and unfair to press too hard. The principled refusal to prescribe leaves the pamphlet at risk of being read as a permission slip — for the burned-out, for the conflict-averse, for organizers who would rather not be held to account. The authors clearly do not intend this, and they explicitly insist that calling in is a complement to calling out rather than a replacement, that joyful militancy is fierce conviction rather than soft retreat, and that abandoning self-sacrifice is not the same as abandoning struggle. The texture of the prose still tends to lean affirmative when a harder line would have been more useful, and the cumulative effect of long interview excerpts in which veteran movement figures describe their own past rigidity with chastened sadness can feel like a wash of contrition that does not always discriminate between excesses worth correcting and capacities worth keeping. The source quality is solid in the sense that it engages many voices and is reflexive about positionality; it is thin in the sense that it offers no archive, no statistics, no systematic ethnography, and traffics in concepts — Empire, rigid radicalism, joy — that are intentionally left loose. That looseness is a methodological commitment, but it is also a methodological cost.

Sad Comforts is for organizers in the kind of scenes it describes — North American anarchist and anti-authoritarian milieus, post-Occupy left organizing, anti-oppression and identity-focused activist cultures, theory-immersed academic adjacencies, the burnout-prone cities the interviews keep returning to — who have felt the weather the pamphlet names and want a vocabulary for it that does not pathologize anyone in particular. It is for readers prepared to take Spinoza seriously as an ethical thinker rather than a metaphysician. It is less useful for readers who want a strategic manual, a list of organizational forms, or an empirically grounded sociology of contemporary left organizing. Its great virtue is that it makes an experience speakable; its great risk is that, having made it speakable, it leans away from the harder work of saying which specific practices, organizations, and habits should be defended and which should be let go. The authors would say, correctly, that any such list is exactly the kind of fixing they have been warning against. They are right, and the pamphlet pays for being right by leaving its most action-relevant claims gentle enough to be misread. Read it for the naming, read it for Federici and Imarisha, read it for the Le Guin epigraph, and read it knowing that the labor of common notions it points at — the careful, ethical, situation-specific work of making shared practice — is the one piece of work the pamphlet has decided it cannot do for you.

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