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Reviewed by:
  • Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements by Chris Dixon
  • Theresa Warburton
ANOTHER POLITICS: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements. By Chris Dixon. Oakland: University of California Press. 2014.

Assembled through an engagement with both movement ephemera, “including zines, flyers, pamphlets, magazines, online discussions, journals, websites, correspondence, notes from meetings and events, and books” (14), and forty-seven in-depth interviews with organizers across the United States and Canada, Chris Dixon’s Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements attempts to give shape to the “anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, non-sectarian left” (2) emerging in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As he notes, “there is no consensus about what we call ourselves, and we have only a general sense that we even exist as something that can be named” (5). Dixon draws on the term ‘another politics’ to describe the multiple movements, commitments, and traditions that make up what he calls the ‘anti-authoritarian current’ in contemporary social movements “because it gestures, poetically, to something in process and unfinished, something that consciously pushed beyond currently available political categories and yet something that can be shared, held in common” (6). His text attempts to illustrate what is held in common throughout this current while leaving open the space to explore the challenges presented by the experiences of veteran organizers.

Building on the premise that movement histories are purposefully erased in order to ensure the need for movements to continually start from scratch rather than building on past experiences, Dixon organizes the book in three sections: “Politics,” “Strategy,” and “Organizing.” He provides a history of the political commitments and ideas undergirding and being taken up by “another politics,” explains how these commitments and ideas have been understood and enacted as practices by organizers, and gives accounts of the successes and challenges arising out of these practices. In doing so, Dixon provides a schema of “another politics” with the shape and structure for which contemporary organizers and activists often yearn while leaving it open to possibility, conversation, and growth.

The clarity and humility with which Dixon writes is both necessary and enviable. Though this text is essential reading for contemporary organizers seeking to situate [End Page 104] themselves in broad social and political networks while becoming more familiar with the historical trajectories undergirding our movements, it could also easily serve as a great primer for anyone interested in the basic tenets and practices undergirding a wide swath of contemporary political organizing. That is, Dixon’s quilted approach to bringing together the work of organizers across North America has enough depth and reflection to allow seasoned organizers to engage a milieu with which they are deeply familiar while his focus on providing a movement history and overview of both strategy and vocabulary throughout means that newcomers won’t feel lost. Here, Dixon accomplishes what many writers can only hope for—he distills intricate histories of movements and ideas into clear, accessible language without sacrificing any of their complexities.

This talent is intrinsic to the success of Dixon’s text. Particularly exciting is his horizontal approach to research, which functions in two ways. Firstly, Dixon’s book is one of few contemporary texts that attempts to articulate relationships between movements rather than only engaging in a vertical analysis between a movement and the system(s) against which it struggles. Secondly, Dixon engages in the research as a person whose thinking is deeply informed by the movements of which he writes and who sees himself as accountable to those movements in his writing. In this way, Dixon enacts the commitments of “another politics” in his writing itself, providing a clear-cut example of how the methods and strategies developed by the organizers he interviews are meaningful and interpreted in a variety of locations, including research. Dixon succeeds at amplifying the voices of on-the-ground organizers rather than academic scholars, reminding us of the profound intellectual practices involved in and emanating from social movements.

In Another Politics, Dixon is able to develop an understanding of the history and content of contemporary social movements in the anti-authoritarian current while successfully navigating the space between severely limiting rigidity and completely...

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