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*Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy*
*Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the
success of transformative social movements.*

Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015

[This article originally appeared in* Waging Nonviolence*.]

Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in
Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building"
organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I
was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American
man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in
Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.

"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.

It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was
booming from a nearby car.

"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their
beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even
imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the
things we've learned."

I explained more about what that meant to me.

He shook his head, amused.

"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get
time for all that?"
 That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book* Another Politics,*
newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of
interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the
book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a
shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from
similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement,
sector, strategy and identity.

Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left
"anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle,
transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization:

. being against domination of all kinds;

. prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social
organization in the process of struggle;

. linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term
transformative visions; and

. grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.


In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together
as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns
and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks
from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based
models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and
prison abolitionists."

He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE!
Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to
developing "another politics" across decades.

Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another
politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of
oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of :
anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and
anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some
organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on
economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?

But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as
practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he
recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city
immigrant rights group* No One is Illegal*:

"In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South
Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's
impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation'
campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to
become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services
regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services,
they finally won in 2013."


 Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring
dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For
instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses
but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at
the speed of the whole.

As Dixon writes,  "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and
relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is
still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new
phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people
should treat one another."

Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another
politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and
domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic
inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.

Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through
oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have
permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists
and others committed to transformational work has created a different way
of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle
rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and
wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other
healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept
at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.

And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building
organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and
goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being,
doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while
avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk
non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that
rise and fall quickly.

Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project
South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to
different kinds of cars suited to particular functions:

"The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the
road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back
or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can
push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can
never get a ride, et cetera."


It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people
with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book
for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't
assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while
experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put
their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not
being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area
activist Harjit Singh Gill.

Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times,
and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like
"non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers
to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in
dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as
instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to
mobilize toward a predetermined end).

"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled
organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle
for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential
allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as
anything less than the destination itself.

Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with
James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations
that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for
skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally
developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational
structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for
lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support
their people to do more with less?

I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer
in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview
subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta,
for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around
questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through
our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his
interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen
our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the
"another politics" leftist lineage.

 ((((((  )))))

*Andrew Willis Garcés* works with Training for Change and has led trainings
for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil
disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/.
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______________________________

Jai Sen

jai.sen at cacim.net / jai at openword.in

www.cacim.net / http://www.openword.in

Now based in Ottawa, Canada (+1-613-282 2900), and New Delhi, India
(+91-98189 11325)

*RECENT PUBLICATIONS :*

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@ http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/
<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/>*

*FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS  :*

Jai Sen and Peter Waterman, eds, forthcoming (2015) – *The Movements of
Movements : Struggles for Other Worlds**,* Part 2. Volume 4 Part II in
the *Challenging
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