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It was so meaningful to join the Green and Red Podcast to talk about the the mass direct action protests that successfully shut down the World Trade Organization ministerial in Seattle in 1999. I particularly appreciated the chance to reflect on the legacy of the protests 25 years later in this very different political moment. As I often say, what we did in Seattle in 1999 wasn’t flawless, but it was an amazing victory. We can celebrate it and learn from it.

Care has become a hot topic in recent years. My sense is that the COVID pandemic, growing economic desperation, and the widespread experiences of exhausted and overburdened parents have especially contributed to this surge in interest. But whatever the precise reasons, there hasbeen a lot of chatter about care – particularly what many call the “care crisis” – in the mainstream press and in scholarly publications. Premilla Nadasen’s book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published last year by Haymarket Books, incisively cuts through this chatter, offering an accessible and illuminating examination of caring labor in the U.S.

Nadasen combines the best of socialist feminism with the strongest analyses of racial capitalism. Drawing on her vast knowledge of domestic labor, she traces the history of care work through slavery, immigration policies, the development of the welfare state, and the turn toward neoliberalism. Nadasen persuasively argues that “the care crisis is not primarily one of family politics. Although also located there, it is a particular manifestation of gendered racial capitalism rooted in coercive political, legal, and economic policies.” This leads her to examine the longstanding care crisis for racialized poor people, to look carefully at differences between paid and unpaid forms of care work, and to investigate the development of industries of care that profit off of human need and misery. She also considers the history of organizing around social reproduction and highlights instructive examples of radical care from social movements.

I highly recommend this book!

Here’s one gem from Nadasen:

Although some people have faith that a robust care agenda can remake capitalism, history shows us that care will not remake capitalism. Remaking care requires abolishing capitalism.

One of the developments on the radical left that I have found most inspiring in recent years is the rapid growth of sharp thinking about the social organization of caregiving. In all of this thinking, I have been most excited about family abolition—a political project that challenges the family form as a linchpin of settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy, and explores more liberatory possibilities for care. As we live through a large-scale crisis of care and frightening attempts by authoritarians to fortify the most repressive aspects of the family form, the project of family abolition is urgently relevant.

Two major contributions to this project are Sophie Lewis’ Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, published last years by Verso, and M.E. O’Brien’s Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, published this year by Pluto Press. I can’t say enough good things about these two, which O’Brien appropriately describes as companion volumes. Lewis offers an accessible and provocative introduction to family abolition, and O’Brien goes deep into the history of the family and speculates about the future of family abolition. These books are worth reading and discussing!

Here’s one representative gem from Lewis:

I’d wager that you, too, can imagine something better than the lottery that drops a neonate arbitrarily among one or two or three or four individuals (of a particular class) and keeps her there for the best part of two decades without her consent, making her wholly beholden to them for her physical survival, legal existence, and economic identity, and forcing her to be the reason they give away their lives in work. I’d wager that you, too, can imagine something better than the norm that makes a prison for adults—especially women—out of their own commitment to the children they love. Together, we can invent accounts of human “nature,” and ways of organizing social reproduction, that are not just economic contracts with the state, or worker training programs in disguise. Together, we can establish consensus-based modes of transgenerational cohabitation, and large-scale methods for distributing and minimizing the burden of life’s work.

Canadian Dimension just posted this piece, my latest “writing with movements” column. I’m re-posting it here.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has announced its formal end. On May 13, 2023, OCAP’s Annual General Meeting formally voted to retire the organization and put its remaining resources toward anti-poverty struggles in Toronto.

For more than thirty years, OCAP was a lodestar on the radical left, propelling an anti-capitalism rooted in the struggles of poor people and a resolute commitment to mass organizing and confrontational direct action. Like many other activists who came of age politically during those years, I was inspired by OCAP and involved in groups that tried to emulate it. I continue to believe that there is a tremendous amount that we can learn from OCAP, including both its strengths and limitations. I’m grateful to the knowledgeable organizers who have already worked to distill some of these lessons, and I’m hoping that more will do so.

Here, I want to lift up one key lesson that we can take from OCAP: intentional endings are important. I know very little about the deliberations that went into the decision by OCAP members to retire their organization. But I have deep respect for groups of people that do the difficult, unglamorous work of reflecting on their efforts, determining that their organization is no longer viable, and purposefully bringing it to a close.

Of the dozens of groups and campaigns with which I’ve been involved, I can count on one hand the number that made a deliberate collective decision to stop. Sadly, this is not at all uncommon on the left. Most often, initiatives fade away through attrition driven by some combination of disillusionment, partial victories, exhaustion, mounting tensions, and new challenges that feel insurmountable. In some cases, groups carry on as mostly hollowed-out shells with only a handful of people still involved and not much more than an online presence. Intentional conclusions are rare.

What accounts for this? I’m not entirely sure, and I’m eager to learn more. I suspect that, at least in part, it has something to do with a dominant culture that glamorizes new endeavors and evades loss and grief. I’m pretty certain, as well, that our underdeveloped capacities for working with conflict play a significant role: unaddressed internal tensions frequently contribute to organizational decline, and in turn, declining organizations are more susceptible to seemingly intractable conflicts. I think there is also perhaps a sense on the left that the only way to win is if our initiatives continue forever. Ending something, for many of us, can feel like a failure.

But concluding our activities with care ultimately strengthens movements. Formal endings enable people to mark and experience loss together, making space for individual and collective grief. This kind of grieving process is essential not just for our wellbeing, but also for allowing us to make commitments to new political initiatives. Conscious conclusions also open opportunities for us to reflect on our shared experiences, both good and bad, and draw out useable knowledge for future efforts. In addition, deliberate wind-ups allow groups to take care of crucial logistical details and obligations, such as wrapping up campaigns, shutting down finances, alerting organizational allies, and archiving websites.

None of this is fantasy. Along with OCAP, there are other organizations that have purposefully ended. One example that has long inspired me is Movement for a New Society (MNS), a U.S.-based network of collectives active in direct-action movements of the 1970s and 1980s. As Andy Cornell details in his excellent book Oppose and Propose!, MNS came into major organizational and strategic questions after more than a decade of work. After many unsuccessful attempts to resolve these questions, assembled members of the network decided in 1988 to “lay the group down,” a procedure drawn from the Quaker tradition. “Doing so, the members agreed, would allow them to devote their energy to new efforts able to more effectively meet the political challenges of the 1990s,” recounts Cornell.

A more recent example from where I live is the Ottawa Street Medics (OSM), a collective that was active in Ottawa between 2020-2021. OSM coordinated mutual aid efforts, including significant fundraising and resource redistribution, and regularly provided first aid at protests, especially during street mobilizations following the police murder of George Floyd. Facing mounting internal challenges in late 2021, OSM paused its work and then compiled a collective assessment. An instructive model for concluding a group, this assessment includes detailed accounting of how they raised and disbursed donations, a description of how they operated, and frank reflections on the difficulties they experienced.

We can learn from the sense of responsibility that these groups – and others too – have brought to their endings. We can also consciously build the skills and habits of closing into the daily activities of political organizing. After all, we all need practice ending things well. If we don’t start working on closings until we’re in an intense situation of laying down a whole organization, we likely won’t feel very well-equipped to respond responsibly to that high-stakes circumstance.

Two lower-stakes closing practices that have been particularly useful in my experience are concluding every meeting with a go-around to “check out” and taking time for an intentional evaluation following every group activity. Gatherings, marches, trainings, direct actions, outreach sessions, pickets, public events – all of these are stronger when we end them deliberately and collectively. And in so doing, we build greater capacities for finishing things with intention.

Closing, in short, can be a way that we care.

“Cultivating a Long View,” my article published in the most recent issue of Upping the Anti, is now freely available on their website!

Here’s an excerpt from my article:

At its core, a long view is a set of habits of thinking and acting based on a particular understanding of history and struggle. These are habits, as I’ve suggested, that we can deliberately cultivate. They include maintaining links to the past, learning from those who came before us, seeing our efforts in intergenerational and global terms, and remaining open to new approaches and unpredictable developments. Built on a collective practice of resistant remembering, these habits can help us to appreciate the fragility of ruling institutions and the always-present possibilities for change. They are resources for identifying opportunities and sustaining hope.

These habits are practically useful as well. That is, they can help us to struggle more effectively right now. In the pace of movements and mobilizations, years can sometimes feel like decades and, with frequent activist turnover, we all too easily end up repeating similar mistakes and fights over and over again. The habits of a long view can help us to listen more carefully, act more collaboratively, reflect more deeply, think more strategically, learn from our mistakes, build on our strengths, and have new discussions that propel us forward.

Upping the Anti just published my new article “Cultivating a Long View.” Subscribe here to access my piece and all of the other great contents in the new issue!

Here’s an excerpt from my article:

Holding a long view means recognizing our obligations to both the past and the future. To the past, we are responsible for sustaining collective memory and emancipatory visions, carrying on legacies of organizing and struggle, and working with others to right systemic wrongs, particularly ones that benefit us. To the future, we are responsible for fighting for a just and habitable world with everything we’ve got, doing what we can to build a foundation for more effective and visionary movements in the years to come, and humbly offering our experiences, reflections, and dreams.

Canadian Dimension just posted this piece, my latest “writing with movements” column. I’m re-posting it here.

The last few decades have seen regular debates on the left that counterpose “activism” and “organizing.” Long-time abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba has recently laid this out plainly, contending that “activists are folks who are taking action on particular issues that really move them in some specific way.” Activism, in this sense, involves people moving into action as individuals motivated by their personal values or politics. And although they may collaborate with like-minded people, activists are not necessarily accountable to anyone else.

There is nothing bad about politically-motivated dedication. However, it can only get us so far if we’re primarily working as individuals, making decisions based largely on what we feel passionate about, and mostly drawing on self-selected activist circles. Organizing, proponents argue, can take us further. This is a process of bringing previously uninvolved people together in sustained ways that build sufficient collective power to force our opponents to accede to our demands. As organizer-turned-scholar Jane McAlevey reminds us, it often takes place in a bounded community, such as a workplace, a faith-based institution, a neighborhood, or a school.

In this way, organizing is not something we can do as lone individuals. “Organizers,” as scholar-turned-organizer Andy Cornell elaborates, “are activists who, in addition to their own participation, work to move other people to take action and help them develop skills, political analysis, and confidence within the context of organizations.” The aim here is to bring more people into motion, grow their capacities, develop shared strategy, and engage in escalating action, all as part of durable collectivities.

We can understand these debates, at least in part, as attempts to navigate the political disorientation of our period. The last few decades have seen a concerted class war from above that, as radical sociologist Alan Sears argues, has ground down much of the infrastructure that movements of the past developed. Meanwhile, entrepreneurship has saturated social life, and the individual has become more and more the main focus for political expression and action. The label “activism” has come to be associated specifically with outspoken people who proclaim their values and denounce injustice.

Let’s not downplay the significance of determined individuals in sustaining radical politics in our difficult time. But let’s also acknowledge that this individually-focused approach can generate real problems, especially when activists (or groups of activists) pursue their own aims, with little accountability to anyone else and outsized confidence that they know what will be most righteous or strategic. It can create problems, as well, when it fortifies “the activist” as a specialized identity and produces radical subcultures closed off from broader sectors of society.

From this perspective, the growing use of the term “organizing” among people in and around social movements is promising. It indicates a shared aspiration: many of us want something more than currently exists. We yearn for forms of political activity that can reach beyond activist circles, create functional and powerful groups, expand participation, and make tangible impacts through collective action. We look longingly (and, let’s be honest, sometimes romantically) at previous efforts – such as anti-colonial movements, waves of mass labor organizing, and radical organizations with substantial memberships – that had some success as doing this. And many of us hungrily turn to podcasts, presentations, trainings, campaigns, discussions, groups, and writings in hopes of developing our organizing skills.

Whatever we choose to call it, this aspiration is worth nurturing. Transformative movements can only benefit from more people bringing their enthusiasm for moving others into motion. At the same time, our efforts will benefit from more clarity and precision about what we’re actually doing together. After all, the distinction between “activism” and “organizing,” like all conceptual tools, is not always accurate or useful. Indeed, it has at least three limitations that are worth bearing in mind.

First, activism can be crucial. Anti-war movements, for example, have often mixed values-driven activism and broader-based organizing and coalition-building. Also, individual activists, motivated by their own politics and ideas, sometimes play key roles as connectors and convenors of efforts that lead to much bigger campaigns or movement upsurges. This is something that experienced migrant justice organizers, in particular, have repeatedly pointed out to me. Movements often build from activist efforts.

Second, “organizing” is not one thing. There are many types of workplace and community organizing, motivated by a range of political priorities. And these aren’t the only approaches. Movements and communities in struggle have generated many other forms of organizing over the last several decades, attempting to build through the various ways that people congregate and form communities. For the southern Black freedom movement, churches, schools, and extended kinship networks were crucial. The women’s liberation movement built from consciousness-raising groups, expansive friendship circles, and counterinstitutions, such as feminist bookstores and centers. For the direct-action AIDS movement, bars and bathhouses were just as important as political groups and families of choice. Most every way that people come together offers opportunities for organizing, but the shape isn’t always the same.

Third, “activism” and “organizing” don’t cover all of the ways in which we work with others in transformative efforts. Even understood expansively, these categories are insufficient. There are so many different roles to play in collective efforts to change the world. Creating artwork, teaching skills, facilitating meetings, engaging in confrontational action, developing strategy for campaigns, doing research, caring for people, giving speeches, putting together organizing committees, fundraising, generating shared analysis, coordinating logistics, meeting with people one-on-one, calling for protests, leading chants and songs, building relationships, convening groups, circulating information – all of these and more are essential to movements. Indeed, people who stick around in struggle tend to take on different roles at different times, as their lives and capacities change. Working with others takes forms that exceed what “activism” and “organizing” describe.

Even with their limitations, these categories are still valuable. Counterposing “activism” and “organizing” – if we can avoid being too rigid or simplistic about it – can usefully orient our movement efforts. On the one hand, it can help us to identify what to avoid: unaccountable, individually-oriented political activity sequestered in subcultural scenes. On the other hand, it can help us to identify what to foster: collaborative political activity, accountable to others, that builds outwardly, bringing more people together and nurturing their capabilities and power.

Of course, we’re working in a social context over which we have limited control right now. The class war from above has produced circumstances that are much more hospitable to atomized activism and much less conducive to shared struggle. We can’t simply will ourselves out of these circumstances. But we can accurately name our activities, acknowledging both their strengths and limitations. And most importantly, we can consciously bring an organizing approach into all of what we do, working to regenerate our collective capacities and build more expansive, durable communities in struggle.

Briarpatch Magazine just published this interview with me by Jen Gobby. I’m re-posting it here.

On December 8, 2021, Research for the Front Lines hosted an online Q&A session with long-time activist, writer, and educator Chris Dixon. Research for the Front Lines is a new initiative that brings together grassroots movements and communities on the front lines of the fight for environmental and climate justice with researchers who have skills, time, and labour to offer. We help establish and support research collaborations that challenge extractive, colonial capitalism and promote just, flourishing alternatives.

The event, entitled Movement-led Research: In Conversation with Chris Dixon, was organized as a learning opportunity for Research for the Front Lines’ volunteers and partners. Hosted by Jen Gobby, activist-scholar, lecturer, and director of Research for the Front Lines, the conversation focused on the skills, principles, and approaches to research with and for social movements, resisting institutional pressures from universities, and building relational accountability with movements.

Chris Dixon, originally from Alaska, is a longtime anarchist organizer, writer, and educator. He lives in Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin territory, where he is a member of the Punch Up Collective.

JG What was your entry point into research with movements?

CD I grew up and was politicized in Anchorage, Alaska, on Dena’ina territory. That profoundly shaped how I think about settler colonialism, capitalism, and extractivism. I spent many years living along the U.S. west coast, where I went to university and was involved in a variety of social and ecological justice organizing efforts. As part of those efforts, I helped to organize the mass direct action protests that shut down the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle. In the wake of those actions, I was deeply involved in what we now call the global justice movement.

In 2002, I started a PhD program in Santa Cruz, California. I had no intention of becoming a professor, but I was eager to use university resources to support the surging movements with which I was connected. For my dissertation, I travelled to cities across North America and conducted interviews with other longtime anti-authoritarian organizers, talking about lessons we were learning, challenges we were facing, and big questions with which we were grappling. I eventually published that research as the book Another Politics.

The years of interviews and writing forced me to think about how to collaborate with people engaged in movements in an ethical way that could further the politics that I care about.

JG What role can research play in transformative struggles for social and environmental justice, and in what ways can it harm?

CD There’s a spectrum of possibilities for what research is and does. On the harmful end, think about the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada’s spy agency. It has a long track record of researching transformative movements and communities in struggle; they research us because they see us as a threat. Or think about geological research. So much of it is in the service of fossil fuel companies whose aim is to make a profit through dispossession and ecological destruction.

I raise these examples because it’s important to think about research that’s actively aimed at undermining our organizing efforts and is actively involved in destroying the world.

There are also forms of research that are more inadvertently aligned with harm. Here we can think about social science disciplines that have long histories of furthering colonialism and capitalism. Take political science: it’s a discipline that in many ways adopts the language and orientation of dominant institutions, and it rarely calls into question any of the major systems of oppression and exploitation that operate through the state.

On the other end of the spectrum, I look to forms of research that are about very consciously contributing to struggles to overturn the existing order and build a more just, sustainable, and equitable society. That necessarily means confronting ruling institutions and relations.

We can think about people who do legal research to help Indigenous land defenders who’ve come under attack by the state. We can think about people who research supply chains – major conduits of dispossession, exploitation, and profit-making on a global scale – in order to advance campaigns against sweatshops.

The research that’s closest to my heart involves engaging with movements directly to elaborate the knowledge that we’re developing together, as we struggle. This involves collectively sharpening our own analytical tools, organizing approaches, and capacities through sharing lessons and reflections.

JG What are some of the barriers you see for folks who are trying to do this kind of movement-engaged research?

CD There are so many forces that move even the most good-hearted researchers into alignment with ruling institutions and away from alignment with transformative movements. It’s a kind of gravitational pull. Those of us who have spent time in academic settings have likely seen or felt this pull ourselves.

Much of this has to do with time and resources, which are often allocated based on how closely you follow a particular program. If you’re a student, that’s about you getting through your course requirements and producing work that fits with university expectations. If you’re a professional academic, that’s about getting grants and getting published in the right places. In many ways, your access to time and resources is governed by a matrix of institutional power.

This produces a particular form of accountability – to the university and, more specifically, to those who teach, supervise, and evaluate you in the university. When we’re doing research alongside movements, we can face real disdain and sometimes material punishments for choosing to direct attention and resources toward people who are doing disruptive things that are unsettling for ruling institutions. And this makes it harder for us to develop sustained connections with movements, organizations, and people who are engaged in struggle, for whom the university is not their primary reference point.

Also, one of the fundamental organizing functions of the university is to get us to understand ourselves primarily as individuals. We’re supposed to pursue our own, very individual career trajectories through the institution, whether as students or workers. That makes it harder to build relationships that can resist the gravitational pull.

JG So, how do we resist the gravitational pull?

CD My main suggestion is to find other people. Build collectivity! This is a really basic point but I think it’s fundamental. It’s so much easier to push back against institutional pressures when we have other people alongside us, whom we’re talking with, whom we’re sharing strategies with, and whom we’re pooling resources with.

I’m not necessarily talking about starting an organization. Find two or three other people that you’re on side with, and figure out how you can start supporting each other. Brainstorm together about what you’re doing, what you can get access to, and what you can push up against. How far can you contravene some of the institutional pressures that you’re facing? It’s going to be easier if you’ve got a few people who have your back.

It’s also much easier to collaborate with communities in struggle when we approach them as collectivities rather than as lone individuals. Many people involved in movements are justifiably skeptical of individual researchers, who often bring their own agendas and priorities. But when we form collectivities – teams, collectives, groups, and other formations – we can set up more deliberate relationships with one another and with movements. And as part of this, we can intentionally work on developing more accountable relations.

The university, as I said, sets up a particular kind of accountability. But what other kind of accountability do we want to build?

In his book Research Is Ceremony, Cree scholar Shawn Wilson builds out a concept of what he calls “relational accountability” in research. I take a lot of inspiration from that idea and, as a non-Indigenous activist-researcher, I also want to be careful about not lifting it out of its context. One question it raises for me: what would it mean for researchers to participate in relations of accountability as part of transformative movements?

There’s a lot to explore with that. One direction is to consider how we determine what we research. If we go with the gravitational pull of the university, what we research is going to be based on a complicated mix of what happens to be trending academically in our field, what we can find resources and support for, and what we happen to have some interest in. But in the spirit of relational accountability, maybe we should consult with people involved in movements we care about and ask them what kinds of questions are worth researching.

Let me give you an example. In 2007, as a PhD student, I was interviewing an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. I was asking him questions about their influential approach to direct action anti-poverty organizing. At one point, he said, “you know, we’ve had so many academics over the years who’ve approached us and wanted to research us, but none of them have ever asked us, ‘what kind of research would be useful for OCAP’s organizing?’” He went on to list a whole bunch of lines of inquiry that would be helpful, including research on the individuals and organizations propelling gentrification and dispossession in downtown Toronto.

That conversation has stayed with me. The main point I take is that perhaps we shouldn’t start with whatever question happens to be hitting us, but instead, we should develop questions in collaboration with people in struggle who are knowledgeable and have a clear sense of what’s at stake.

Inspired by the activist-geographer Laura Pulido, another way I think about accountability has to do with reciprocity: as researchers, what are we actually offering? And whom are we offering it to? The prevailing approach is that researchers write articles and give presentations. Those can be useful, but maybe they’re not always the most important? Let’s consider other ways that we can offer our labour and resources. These might include helping to build a popular education curriculum, doing some research to further a campaign, or taking on crucial but less glamorous organizing tasks, such as providing child care, making banners, or setting up for meetings.

Not everything we do, as researchers working alongside movements, is going to be legible or even welcome within universities. That’s okay! Resisting the gravitational pull requires us to stay focused on movements and struggles.

JG What advice do you have for researchers who are not affiliated with a university for getting started or involved in movement-led research?

CD There are different kinds of challenges and opportunities for those of us who are not in or adjacent to universities. One of the challenges is that we may not have access to the same kinds of resources, whether that’s digital access to journals, financial support, or institutional legitimacy. On the other hand, we’re not bound by any of the expectations and guidelines that govern so much university-based research. For instance, we don’t have to wade through institutional ethics protocols in order to interview people.

One of the real opportunities for independent researchers is in entirely bypassing universities and connecting with movements directly. We can seek out collectivities of people in struggle – organizations, campaigns, and so on – and offer our time and skills. We can inquire about what people need and try to figure out what we can access in order to meet those needs. And we don’t have to worry about trying to justify that within an academic context at all.

But the thing that we need to work on is building durable relationships with movements and communities in struggle. Otherwise, it can feel like we’re just floating. And here again, I have the same advice for people both in and outside of academic institutions: don’t go it alone. Find other people – even just a couple of other folks who are interested in doing research for social justice – who are perhaps similarly situated as you. Figure out how you can connect, what you can start together, and what you want to accomplish.

JG Where have you seen this go bad?

CD I’ve heard stories from activists who have been quoted or portrayed in published material without their consent. One friend, for instance, told me about being named and quoted in a book and said, “that researcher never asked me whether they could include this in print.” Along similar lines, researchers have sometimes documented discussions within organizations without checking to see whether it was okay to share those discussions publicly.

There are at least two ways this can be very bad. One is that activists are portrayed in ways that don’t accurately represent their ideas and efforts. The other is that they’re described in ways that accurately represent them but also endanger them or undermine their objectives.

I’ve also seen people who’ve done quite principled research, who’ve tried to be accountable. But when they get to the stage at which they are writing their thesis, article, or book, they cut off contact with those with whom they’ve been engaged. In those situations, it seems like the researchers just didn’t know how to navigate the space of turning what was a collaborative process into something that fit within academic or publication expectations. This usually creates a lot of conflict around the final product because there had been a pretty good process, but then that process was severed from the final outcome.

While I understand the pressures that produce that kind of circumstance, I want to point out that it can be tremendously damaging to other attempts at building accountable relationships. It really undermines trust.

JG Earlier you mentioned collective knowledge created in movements and how we can work together to sharpen the tools of organizing. Would you elaborate more on this?

CD In 2005, when I was an angry graduate student, I published an article with my friend Doug Bevington titled “Movement-Relevant Theory.” We basically criticized much of the existing scholarship on social movements. Part of what we emphasized – and I continue to stand by this – is the significance of what we called “movement-generated theory.”

We made a basic observation based on our own experiences: if you spend any length of time in a movement, you’ll see that people are constantly theorizing. They’re coming up with new ideas, new ways of understanding things, of critically assessing the terrain of struggle on which they fight. And of course, every movement has its own internal conflicts and debates, which are also important forms of movement-generated theory.

The late Aziz Choudry, a longtime activist who became an ambivalent academic later in his life, did a tremendous amount of work to explore this intellectual work in movements. I particularly recommend his book Learning Activism.

So, any time we’re trying to do research with movements, I believe that movement-generated theory should be the starting point. What are the questions, debates, and ideas that people are already engaged in producing? How can we develop and deepen these, collectively?

Now, that’s not necessarily a useful starting point for when we’re researching our enemies. But I think it can still offer some grounding, even as we research ruling institutions in grim circumstances. I’ll give you an example of this, which comes from my political collective, Punch Up. We spent much of 2021 carefully combing through a decade’s worth of reports to learn about complaints against the Ottawa Police Service. We were trying to understand how much damage they are doing in our city and how they account for it. Of course, their accounting is terrible. For me, doing this research was really quite devastating because it’s all about the cops hurting people in the place where I live.

As hard as it was, doing that research was a conscious contribution to the defund campaign in Ottawa. We wanted to examine the complaints and understand better how the cops evade any accountability or criticism. Throughout, for me, it was important to keep going back to the visionary ideas of the Movement for Black Lives and abolitionism. The collective knowledge developed in those movement efforts suggests that there’s a whole other way that we could be living, one that doesn’t require the carceral state. Movement-generated theory can offer so much fuel for our imaginations and actions.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It has also been slightly expanded to include additional examples. For the full transcript, see the “resources” page of researchforthefrontlines.ca.

Canadian Dimension just posted this piece, my latest “writing with movements” column. I’m re-posting it here.

“How many people around us have burnt out, are depressed or completely overwhelmed by our struggles and family life?” ask organizers Rushdia Mehreen and Pascale Brunet. Reckoning with depletion in activist circles, Politics & Care, the Montreal-based initiative with which they’re associated, creates spaces for activists to organize toward collective wellbeing. Part of what’s remarkable about their work is the way they foreground caring labor in movements.

Usually associated with women, caring labor is the daily and nightly work that people do to nourish others, materially and relationally. It includes everything from assessing needs and tending to sick people, to raising money and figuring out logistics, to setting up and cleaning up, to mediating conflicts and relating to interpersonal harm, and so much more.

Caring labor is happening all the time in movements and communities in struggle. This includes activities such as welcoming newly involved people, checking in on those who have experienced trauma or death, transporting people to protests and meetings, cooking for those who are ill or new parents, hosting potlucks and dance parties, and building relationships with activists in other places and movements.

Care work, to paraphrase a slogan from Domestic Workers United, makes all other work in movements possible. Groups can’t hold large-scale gatherings without people preparing food. Organizations can’t function effectively unless people tend to hurt feelings and unstated tensions. Protest organizers can’t sustain militant direct action without people providing first aid and legal support. Parents and caregivers can’t participate in events unless people make intentional space for kids.

In short, the success of movements frequently rests on their collective capacities to do caring labor consistently and well.

Yet ruling relations have rendered caring labor largely invisible. Feminists of the 1970s, particularly Black feminists and other feminists working within and against the Marxist tradition, were some of the first to point this out. Thanks to their efforts and those who have built on them, we can now understand that colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy have structured an historically-specific set of social arrangements for how the work of care happens in North America. In these arrangements, caring labor is feminized and devalued.

Discussions on the left about movement-building all too often reproduce these arrangements. Most of us who have spent time in activist circles will recognize the sadly familiar dynamic of care work being treated as less “real” or “important” than other forms of political activity. Instead, the focus tends to be on outwardly-oriented work associated with men. When movements replicate this tendency, writes activist-scholar Dean Spade, they primarily lift up “people who give speeches, negotiate with bosses and politicians, get published, get elected, and otherwise become visible as actors in ways that align with dominant hierarchies.”

Contemporary media cultures have exacerbated this tendency. For sure, activists have been able to make use of social media platforms to generate networks of care and amplification that, at least in some ways, circumvent the atomizing orientations of these technologies. At the same time, the kinds of political efforts that tend to be highly valued – whether presentations, publications, or protests – are fairly easy to share through tweets and Instagram posts. They usually fit within the technical constraints of these platforms and frequently can conform to prevailing norms of individual achievement.

Meanwhile, the activities of care work – whether planning a meeting, gathering resources, or supporting someone through a hard time – are much less easy to acknowledge and represent. These activities are often slow-moving and collective, and it’s difficult to convey their significance within character limits.

All that said, this tendency is not a new problem on the left. Because caring labor is feminized, many people – especially but not only cisgender men – have tended to overlook it. Take children’s activities. It’s striking to learn how socialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries unthinkingly assumed that women would organize care for kids. Even as socialist women built impressive schools and other programs with thousands of children participating, socialist leaders (mostly men) rarely accorded these efforts any importance or prioritized them for organizational resources. What’s even more striking is how consistent this pattern has been through many subsequent movements.

Another telling example is prisoner support. State repression of movements over the last fifty years has generated a lot of political prisoners, some of whom have spent decades behind bars. Although a few of these incarcerated revolutionaries have been lionized on the left, the unglamorous day-to-day work of supporting them and their families has been taken up mainly by very small all-volunteer groups and networks, usually led by women, non-binary people, and trans people. Those consistently doing this work have built remarkable campaigns that have nourished imprisoned activists and, in some cases, won their freedom. Although crucial for movement survival and continuity, this labor is mostly unrecognized outside of prisoner support circles, and larger organizations seldom direct resources to it.

Across cycles of struggle, good-hearted activists with liberatory aspirations have regularly related to care work as an afterthought, if at all. But as long-time organizers Hilary Moore and Joshua Kahn Russell point out, “legitimizing some work as ‘real’ and keeping other work unacknowledged isn’t useful to movement building.” This tendency produces a distorted understanding of what is required to generate winning movements and sustain struggles for the long haul.

Prevailing norms and habits might focus our attention on highly-visible activities, such as mobilizations and media work. Yet as Moore argues in her master’s thesis “An Ethic of Care,” “it is important to look at the extensive and intensive work that is taking place ‘behind the scenes’” – the much less celebrated efforts that underpin the big events. “Moreover,” she adds, “we need to consider the work of mending, maintaining, and building the social relations that are necessary to make even the ‘behind the scenes’ organizing possible.”

There are many instructive examples of collectively-organized care in movements. Going back to at least the 1970s, we can find instances of organizations formally setting up collective childcare arrangements. In the 1980s, the direct-action anti-nuclear movement formalized the role of the “vibes watcher,” a person tasked with paying attention to emotions during activist meetings. Many movements have since adapted versions of that role, now sometimes including designated support people at events and protests. Building on similarly long histories, it is also now commonplace for confrontational protests to be accompanied by street medic teams and legal defense crews. And the last two decades have seen many movement-based experiments with structures for addressing interpersonal conflict and harm in groups.

With skill and intention, caring labor knits together social fabric as part of collective fights for justice and dignity. And when we recognize the significance of this work, we can deliberately organize care in ways that strengthen our efforts and advance our aims.