Preface

The Joy of Revolution was first published in 1997 in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb. For this separate reprinting of it I’ve divided the chapters into short subchapters to make it more clearly readable. Apart from that, I haven’t made any significant changes. Asterisked footnotes are from the original text. Asterisks within brackets [*] refer to the new notes and updates at the end of the book.

Actually, although it’s been quite a while since its original publication, I haven’t found much that needs updating. My main aim in writing it was to examine the pros and cons of various radical tactics in the context of some basic, frequently recurring types of situations. There have, of course, been some significant new developments since 1997, but I think that most of our basic problems and possibilities remain much the same.

So I’ve left The Joy of Revolution as is, but I have added several more recent texts, including reports on the Occupy movement and on two radical movements in France and observations on the coronavirus shutdown and on the increasingly vicious and delirious Trump regime.

That regime was already demonstrating the need for fundamental social change more clearly and dramatically than if we had continued to drift along with business-as-usual regimes. It now also seems to be fragmenting at an increasingly rapid pace thanks to the varieties of popular resistance all over the country, most recently by the courageous, compassionate, and inventive people of Minnesota. I hope this book contributes to that process.

Thanks to the folks at PM Press for their enthusiastic collaboration, and special thanks to Jeanne Smith for her superb design work and invaluable technical assistance.

KEN KNABB
March 2026
 

Preface to The Joy of Revolution and Related Texts (PM Press, 2026).