Here’s this week’s essay for our current political circumstances. Make sure to read to the end for more Necessary Evil training and content updates 🫡

Revolution is NOT a metaphor

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If you've spent any time on god's green internet lately, you have probably been inundated with posts trying to "reclaim" or “expand” or “soften” the idea of revolution.

Rest is revolution.

Joy is revolution.

Community is revolution.

Friendship is revolution.

You are the revolution.

Everything is revolution.

Many experiences are enriching, enlivening, and worthwhile — even necessary — for our lives. But that doesn't make them revolution. The distinction matters: if we want real political change, we can't allow our energy to be dissipated or coopted by activities that aren't grounded in material change and political transformation.

What does metaphorical, commodified "revolution" look like?

You may have seen ✨ inspirational ✨ social media posts calling on you to engage in rest, or to celebrate loudly and find pockets of joy, or to reimagine your participation in our capitalist landscape, calling each of these actions something like "your own personal act of revolution." It's this type of aesthetic or metaphorical adaptation of the concept of revolution that this essay argues against.

Don't misunderstand. Joy, rest, dance, friendship, community, connection, movement — all of these can be critical components of a holistic human experience. But it's important to be clear about the work they do, and the work they don't accomplish by themselves. If resting and taking moments of reflection gives you the energy to reengage, or helps your body feel renewed enough to put it on the line to de-arrest a comrade or prevent one of your neighbors from being kidnapped by ICE, it's clearly an integral part of your revolutionary action. But rest by itself is not the revolution. Your political power does not begin and end there.

Much online discourse of late has focused on "joy as revolution," a decontextualized phrase stolen from the struggle for Black Liberation, where Black Joy is seen as an acknowledgment of spirits that have not been decimated by oppression, but instead are resilient and capable of the full range of human experience and emotion. Stemming from Audre Lorde's oft-quoted directive that self-care can be "an act of political warfare," Black joy as a form of resistance is mitigating against popular portrayals of the Black experience as one of only trauma, suffering, and subjugation, and has a cultural and historical context that distinguishes it from the more generalized, watered-down appropriation of the idea that "joy is resistance" or calls to create "joy revolutions."

Even the specific idea of Black joy as a revolutionary experience has been broadened, popularized, and commercialized in ways that diverge from the initial idea that Black resilience and humanity is worth protecting, celebrating, and publicizing—and that the very existence of visible Black joy and resilience undermines the totalizing narrative of White supremacy.

But the point here isn't to litigate who gets to experience joy, or in what ways. Rather it's to distinguish that the initial idea undergirding "joy revolutions" and self-care as politicized action was located in the Black experience, and has since diffused into platitudes and appropriation by popular culture, capitalism, and grift. That doesn't negate the value of joy; it only suggests caution in limiting our revolutionary aspirations to emotional exuberance or moments of self-care. Joy (or friendship, community, rest, any of the other "good" things being repackaged as revolution of late) may be critical to experiencing the full range of our humanity and proving to ourselves that authoritarian forces have not fully won. It might even allow us to pursue revolutionary ends. But it is at most an input into our revolutionary agenda, not revolution unto itself.

Who cares — it's all just words

Words are obviously limited, and language is an equilibrium—it expands and contracts in meaning as we use it to relate to each other.

AND.

How we use words shapes how we think and how we act. I mean, hell, we now use "literally" precisely to mean "metaphorically."

Where this elision of meaning becomes dangerous in the realm of "revolution," though, is the risk that your energy and ideals dissipate away from concrete, direct actions toward political change toward immediate catharsis.

Saying something is not revolutionary does not mean it cannot be important or worthwhile, that you should not engage in it, or that it cannot alleviate suffering or have meaning. It may be a necessary condition for living in the world, but it may not be a sufficient condition for, or equivalent to, revolution.

How we name our experience and the words we use matter. If joy is revolution, then I can be satisfied that my political work is done when I experience emotional satisfaction. If rest is revolution, I can consider myself absolved of additional responsibility for contributing to change when I individually satisfy my own needs to take a break from work. Even more risky are slogans that internalize revolution as a felt sense of the body, or suggest that revolution is something you can "be" or "become." These identity-driven arguments ask us to so fully internalize the idea of revolution that we don't see it in its social and political context anymore at all: if I am the revolution, then my own self-improvement and internal work is sufficient change to instantiate in the world.

The intention behind these statements or social media credos may not be malicious. These statements may even be intended to inspire us, help us feel how vibrant and exceptional our lives can be, or evoke gratitude for moments of longed-for connection. At risk, though, is dividing or defusing our energy. If we are lulled into complacency by empty platitudes convincing us that simple felt senses or common individual experiences are revolution, we can lose our sense of commitment to action.

It's critical to point out here that not everything you do in your life must be "revolution." Joy and rest and dance and play and movement and art can all simply be activities you enjoy or emotions you relish or facets of your life...that doesn't make them revolution, but it also doesn't absolve you from evaluating what you can do that is revolutionary. If you have the values and desire to pursue revolution, the question is how and with what actions.

"If I can't dance, it's not my revolution"

One of the most oft-quoted statements about revolution is one that was never said. Not in so many words, anyway.

Many a t-shirt, bumper sticker, and mug attributes the sentiment "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution" to Emma Goldman—an iconic anarchist revolutionary. This idea bears remarkable similarity to some of these other claims circulating in social media discourse lately. This supposed quote is often applied to coax others to lighten up, to not take things too seriously or militantly, to see expressions of excitement, joy, and disinhibition as part of revolutionary action.

Those might be useful sentiments in the abstract, but they are not what Emma Goldman said or what she meant. And the distinction she made is important for us here and now, to begin to understand what is revolutionary.

Rather, what Emma Goldman said, as she reports in her own autobiography Living My Life (1931) is:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman, Goldman's lover], 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… 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 conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. . . If it meant that, I did not want it.

You can read more about the meme-ification of Emma's sentiments here, but what I want to drive home is the way this idea has been warped to suggest that our revolutions must be or have aesthetic components, encompass joy, comfort, exhilaration, or have pleasure as a key element. Read this way, in the meme t-shirt/mug version, Goldman is saying we should eschew and reject revolutions that aren't joyful ones, ones with dancing.

Read in her original reporting of the instance, though, the inverse is true: our revolutions should liberate us to feel and be as free as we've ever hoped, but the revolution precedes liberation. Revolution isn't caused by or completely synonymous with things like dancing or having fun, even if they aren't in conflict with each other.

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