Another Politics: Talking across Today's Transformative Movements Paperback – August 15, 2014

Skateboarding. I think skateboarding is the best analogy I can find for why I think this book is so important, why you should buy it and read it, and why you should engage the questions that it raises by talking with friends or forming a study group.In the early days, before skateboarding was a sport, when it was just another childhood novelty, another slinky or pogo stick, there wasn't much that had to be said about it. The skateboarding "discourse" was mighty thin. Just throw together ramshackle roller-skate wheels and plywood, and find a smooth surface for some sidewalk surfing. But in the 80's--as so interestingly captured in retrospectives like Dogtown and Z-Boys--when a bunch of surf kids started putting in the extra time to explore the possibilities under their feet, and then in that transcendent moment when they realized they could go from just hugging the ground to actually rocketing into the air, everything changed. Skateboarding transformed into something different, and the vocabulary, the areas of interest and focus, the very understanding of what good or bad skateboarding was were completely reshaped. Flips and spins and gaps and railslides were thrown out there into the culture to be pondered, practiced, perfected. It turned out that the childhood novelty contained exquisite potential for demonstrating human grace and ingenuity.I think that this book, Another Politics, documents a similar historical moment in the development of North American anti-authoritarian politics: the moment where many of us are realizing that our often dismissed movements really can defy society's gravity and launch us into freer air.This book deftly shows how the last 25 plus years have seen the steady convergence of a variety of political threads--including the punk and peace movement pedigree of anarchist direct actions and organizing styles; the brilliant and innovative tidal wave of women of color feminism that has washed across the academy, the non-profit sector, and grassroots campaign initiatives; and the visionary call of prison abolitionists to imagine a world without jails. With time and experience, these movements have discovered their ability to evolve from being gadflies and nuisances, to winning small changes, to actually projecting and building new kinds of bottom-up people power. Right now we are in a thrilling time where we're starting to take ourselves more seriously as a legitimate political pole; we're starting to acknowledge that our wheels can leave the ground and do amazing things in the air. And, like a documentarian hanging out on the edges of graffitied swimming pools in 1980's California, Chris Dixon seems to be in just the right places at the right time to show us how the discourse is changing on the ground.Just as skateboarding's aerial paradigm shift completely changed the way people understood the sport and talked to each other within it, the blossoming of what Dixon calls the anti-authoritarian current has led to a cascade of new questions, new vocabulary, and new ways of understanding success and failure. The greatest strength of Another Politics is how it distills numerous organizers' voices as they talk through their experiences of this shifting landscape. From the Bay Area to New Orleans, from Atlanta to Toronto, from New York City to Vancouver, we feel like witnesses to and participants in fiery living room conversations. Whether we are hearing reflections on grassroots responses to Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy, the mobilization of Sikh communities to resist deportations, or the youth organizers of Sista II Sista liberating their New York neighborhoods from violence, we get to see the somewhat raw and intimate hopes and doubts that accompany all the flashy public organizing work. We see person after person asking about care and mutual support within our movements; about questions of long-term strategy and how to better analyze who our enemy is (what Dixon condenses as the "four anti's"); about nuanced approaches to anti-authoritarian leadership; about the opportunities and traps of the "non-profit industrial complex;" about the search to build stable and nurturing "political homes;" and about sustaining our vision of a new world while staying grounded in the world as it is. In all of this, we are spared any heavy-handed prescriptive formulas and instead--especially in the final chapter--welcomed into the conversation.Certainly, there are gaps in Dixon's coverage of these emerging dialogues. First is the book's own admission that it focuses almost exclusively on urban organizing. With some of the most promising experiments with grassroots organizing happening in the fields of Oregon, in the mining towns of Appalachia, and in rural communities all over the South, one really feels the need for a rurally-focused companion volume. Second, I think the book--presumably in the interest of highlighting the freshness of the modern anti-authoritarian current--distances itself a little too far from the legacy of capital-A Anarchism, and could have been further enriched by including more of the crucial reflections and contributions from anti-authoritarian movement corners like Z Magazine and Z-Net, Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective, and the growing class-struggle anarchist milieu. Third, I found myself wishing that Dixon's interviews would have more thoroughly explored issues of repression and intentional movement de-stabilization, which will only get heavier as our movements gain headway. Fortunately, the book is humble and accessible enough to recognize where it falters, and opens space for others to fill in the gaps.As far as I've tried to push the skateboarding analogy, there is one area where it completely falls apart: whereas skateboarding's airborne revelations and subsequent evolution turned it into an ever more specialized--and professionalized--pastime, the rise of anti-authoritarian politics depends on quite the opposite process. As the anti-authoritarian current finds its confidence and grows, it must open itself up to even more widespread participation, with even more of us weighing in on all the urgent and powerful questions of the day. It must belong to more than just Dixon and the 50+ people he interviewed in this book. It must belong to all of us.The reason why I recommend this book so highly, then, is because Another Politics feels like precisely the kind of historical and theoretical primer that I think we need for more people to be able to lend their voices to the discussion.

A smart and nuanced explanation of the complex landscape of grassroots activism and resistance in North America. This important book, based on extensive interviewed, is beautiful exploration and synthesis, offering both a topology and genealogy of recent American radicalisms.

Stimulating and provocative.