Chris Dixon, Another Politics, Talking Across Today’s Transformative Social Movements
Oakland, University of California Press, 2014
For information on how to order this book go to: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520279025
I write these brief reflections on this important book as someone who has been an organizer/activist with the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty, which is a direct action anti-poverty group, and to an extent as an activist who has been involved in the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist left (although with a more autonomist marxist inflection) that Chris Dixon writes about. These comments are in no way intended to provide a full review of this major contribution.
Another Politics is based on rich and informed discussions with anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist organizers across what are now called ‘Canada’ and the ‘USA.’ Many of these organizers have been shaped by anti-racist feminism and anti-oppression politics, currents within anarchism, and prison abolitionism. These include organizers with No One Is Illegal, Critical Resistance and others organizing against the prison industrial complex, direct action anti-poverty organizers, and feminist, queer and trans organizers, among many others. The detailed ethnographic work the book rests on is rich and inspiring and brings organizing and the dilemmas we so often face as activists vividly to life.
I really like how Chris uses the Zapatista saying of walking we ask questions to inform the entire book. There is no attempt to provide the answers here but rather to raise the questions that are produced through talking across the movements these organizers are involved in. These questions are crucial to engage with in developing a more socially transformative praxis. One area that struck me as vital is the need to develop practices of non-authoritarian forms of leadership, or “leadership from below,” in our organizing which is difficult but is also crucial to the sustainability of radical organizing. I really appreciated the emphasis on the need to fight against amnesia and the social organization of forgetting where our movements have come from and what ‘we’ (in all our varied social locations) have accomplished and won. This resonates with my current work with the AIDS Activist History Project and with my historical sociological work on queer histories, national security campaigns and the making of the current neo-liberal queer.
I also really enjoyed the emphasis on prefigurative praxis where we make and hold onto aspects of the making of alternative social relations through our struggles and organizing in the present with all the possible pitfalls of these approaches. I also found illuminating the ways Chris navigated through the very real tensions encountered in organizing on the ground in our communities and movements throughout the book. I saw my passions, desires and questions reflected in many of the pages of this book. It is a major contribution and I hope it facilitates badly needed conversations within the anti-authoritarian left and the emergence of a more clearly developed anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist perspective that can both sustain, deepen, and expand our struggles. This is especially crucial given the re-assertion of forms of authoritarian left organizing among some radicals searching for strategy and organization. For all these reasons I sing the praises of this book.
At the same time I have some questions and suggestions.
I was very glad Chris engaged with the need for a broader sense of class and class struggle in the conclusion to the book but I wish it had been there more profoundly painted into the fabric of the book from the beginning. Broader notions of class and class struggle can include struggles over oppression, power and autonomy within a working class that centrally includes those who engage in unpaid labour and reproductive and domestic labour and more. This broader notion of class and class struggle (which is still in development!) centrally needs to address questions of oppression and social differences and social power within the working class. Class and class struggle can also provide us with a sense of historical and materialist dynamism in our analysis. For instance neo-liberal capitalism and class relations including the politics of austerity are central to engage with in all our struggles today even if they do not always seem to be directly ‘class related.’ In some ways I think a return to aspects of the Race Today and Wages for Housework type analysis of the need for autonomy and struggles for power by people of colour and women within working class struggles would be very useful in cutting across some of the problems with identity politics and also with some readings of ‘intersectionality.’ I prefer Himani Bannerji’s notion of a mediational analysis to how intersectionality is often used since it more clearly captures both the moment of autonomy and of mutual construction (how relations of oppression and exploitation are always made in and through each other) within the relations between different forms of social oppression and exploitation.
I also think using John Holloway’s expression of operating simultaneously within, against and beyond capitalism/oppression would be useful to add into the mix. Chris uses against and beyond quite effectively but they would be better grounded, in my view, recognizing that we are also within and through our own actions also participate in producing capitalist and oppressive relations. Our power to do which produces the social world is appropriated from us through the power over relations of exploitation and oppression. This gives a broader sense of our capacities and power for agency and social transformation. I also think this could provide a better grounding for the wonderful use of the formulation of operating “within the world but not of it” throughout the book. Related to this at times I felt that the use of ‘systems’ can carry with it an image of us being up against external structures that we do not also produce. This is why I prefer a social relational approach that makes clearer that we produce these relations even if we have lost control over them and that we therefore have the capacity to transform them.
Finally the analysis in the book is held back to an extent by an acceptance that there is a distinct and separate realm of the ‘economic.’ In my view theorizing the ‘economic’ as a separate realm is a form of fetishism or reification – transforming the relations people produce into relations between things through commodity and money fetishism for instance. I read Marx in his critique of political economy as engaging in a critique of economic theorizing for hiding human social practices behind the appearance of economic things and objects. Instead of the power of things we need to always make as visible as possible people’s social practices as resources for social transformation.
Despite these questions and concerns this book is a must read for radical organizers and activists. It provides us with a record of where we have come from, our strengths, capacities, and weaknesses, but also the dilemmas and contradictions we must address in developing a more transformative praxis for making a new world. For this I thank Chris for all the dedicated work that he put into this book. It is not the final word but it is a crucial opening for the discussions that we need. I hope people seize it and use it.
Gary Kinsman
Some references
Himani Bannerji, Thinking Through, Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism, Toronto, Women’s Press, 1995.
John Holloway, How to Change the World Without Taking Power, London: Pluto Press, 2005.
John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, London: Pluto Press, 2010.