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

Sectarianism is one of the most persistently demoralizing features of left political cultures. It usually involves a group of people believing they have a monopoly on the truth and, based on this certainty, they sideline, smear, or sabotage others on the left who are not part of their political tendency or organization. Looking across left history, it is no exaggeration to say that this kind of conduct has been tremendously destructive, occasionally leading to physical conflicts, often undermining organizing efforts, and almost always weakening movements.

Today, in a time of overlapping crises and fast-paced social media cultures, sectarianism has taken on new and destructive forms. But at least one thing has remained consistent: a lot of people committed to social justice spend a lot of time attempting to argue definitively that particular left political tendencies, ideas, or initiatives are bad. We regularly put energy—in conversations and increasingly online—into tearing down the efforts of others who share many of our aims but who we see as wrong-headed. And we especially tend to do this during periods when we are experiencing significant collective defeats.

Many of us, as activists and organizers, are exhausted from cycling through teardowns and hungry for something more constructive. This is something I’ve heard consistently for years. And I think it’s a major reason for the immense influence of the book Emergent Strategy by facilitator and writer adrienne maree brown. For me, the standout section of brown’s book is “A Protocol for Haters.” In this section, she urges us to turn away from what she calls “critique mode” habits and, instead, to cultivate a core intention: “I invest my energy in what I want to see grow.”

The approach brown offers enables us to reflect more deeply on our motivations and aims. Are we critical of what other people are doing? Is this a disagreement or a concern about real harm? If it’s a disagreement, rather than trying to convince everyone of our critique, why not collaborate with some others to build something we believe will be more effective, lively, and durable? How about directing our activity toward what we want to thrive and encouraging others to do the same?

To be clear, this doesn’t mean agreeing with everything everyone else is doing or saying, or overlooking real limitations in political initiatives. It certainly doesn’t mean setting aside our core principles and critical perspectives. If we’re going to transform the world, we have to think carefully together about our activities and directly contend with the conflicts, harms, and tensions that we inevitably encounter. On the left as in life more generally, trying to ignore problems almost always leads to bigger ones.

But brown helpfully identifies the danger of devoting the bulk of our precious energy to criticizing efforts in which we’re not directly involved. As she notes, “Pointing out the flaws of something still requires pointing at it, drawing attention to it, and ultimately growing it.” In other words, focusing a lot of critical energy on something can serve to lift up precisely what we want to diminish. It can also be an enormous drain on time and resources that we could otherwise direct toward more constructive uses.

Taking a longer view can be illuminating here. “Over the years,” brown observes, “I have found that when a group isn’t serving the people, it doesn’t actually last that long, and it rarely needs a takedown—things just sunset, disappear, fade away, absorb into formations that are more effective.” In large part, this has been my experience, too.

There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes activist circles harbour abusive people and shield them from consequences. Well-resourced NGOs and political parties regularly constrain insurgent movements. Periodically, radical political tendencies lay singular claim to “militancy” and caustically attack everyone who doesn’t meet their revolutionary standards. Occasionally groups develop into destructive cults. Troubling initiatives do persist at times.

We can take proactive steps to reduce the likelihood and damage of these kinds of circumstances. In our groups, we can develop infrastructure to prevent and respond to interpersonal harms, we can build bottom-up processes of decision-making and accountability, and we can make explicit plans for resisting state infiltration and disruption.

Still, in some situations, focused critical attention may well be the best—or only—contribution to make. Even then, though, we can direct our activity toward what we want to see grow by holding fast to principled, constructive critique. This means criticizing the strongest versions of ideas and initiatives instead of relying on simplified caricatures and personal attacks. It means bringing genuine curiosity toward why people think what they think and do what they do, attempting to understand underlying hopes, fears, and other motivations.

Rather than scoring political points, fortifying subcultural territory, or elevating organizations, we should strive to build emancipatory movements that can win without destroying the people involved.

Ultimately, it is a positive sign when the left is flourishing enough to have diverse and differentiated politics and formations—even as this so often leads to more tension, debate, and conflict. To understand this as a barometer of health for the left is to take what activist-scholar Jen Gobby usefully calls, in her book More Powerful Together, a “movement ecosystem perspective.”

This perspective illuminates the dynamic interplay among the full range of efforts (some in conscious coordination, some in active disagreement) that make up effective movements. It can, writes Gobby, “help nurture a humility that allows us to see that each of our favoured approaches to change is necessary but not sufficient.”

With this kind of humility, let’s strive to make conscious decisions about where and how we focus our efforts. Let’s be thoughtful about our critical attention. Let’s see what we can grow.

When I was twenty, I spent the summer voraciously reading queer theory books recommended by knowledgeable friends. These books profoundly impacted me as a cisgender man who ambivalently identified as straight; they helped me reflect more deeply on my own sexuality and intimate relationships. Ever since, queer activism, sociality, and thinking has been a touchstone for me. Jane Ward’s book The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, published last year by NYU Press, generously offers the insights of queer liberation movements and theorizing to all of us. Ward examines heterosexuality – what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality” and what Gary Kinsman calls “heterosexual hegemony” – as a structure and culture that requires tremendous work, violence, and heartbreak to sustain. She traces the history of “self-help” resources aimed at straight people (what she evocatively describes as the “heterosexual repair industry”), offers an ethnography of so-called “pick-up artists” and the men who attend workshops to emulate them, and highlights contemporary queer observations of straight culture. I especially appreciate Ward’s concept of “the misogyny paradox” at the heart of hetero-patriarchy: “the cultural expectation that men should like women, even as they are socialized into a culture that normalizes men’s hatred of women.” Throughout the book, she also brings contagious confidence that things can be much better than they are, including for straight men and the people who love them. It’s really wonderful, almost 23 years after my first deep dive into queer theory, to be reminded again how revelatory and liberating these insights are!

Here’s one gem from Ward:

Marriage experts recognized men’s disinterest and violence toward women, and women’s resentment and fear of men, as fundamental obstacles for straight relationships, and, consequently, they produced an industry designed to train men and women to like each other. But they were also committed to doing so without undermining men’s authority or challenging the basic logic of the gender binary. These rehabilitative projects constitute the modern heterosexual repair industry, an industry that capitalized on the difficult and unfinished transition from heterosexual coupling as a patriarchal contract to straightness as a relationship, and an identity, anchored in opposite-sex desire.

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

The last few years have seen a sharp uptick in discussions on the North American left about right-wing movements. This makes sense. Across the globe, we’ve seen far-right forces gaining access to state power as well as aggressively mobilizing in the streets. Some of the most striking examples have been in Hungary, Brazil, India, and the U.S., but there have been many other instances, including in the Canadian context.

Many of us, as activists and organizers, are hungry for analysis that can help us understand right-wing movements more clearly and counter them more effectively. But with fast-moving events, a high-velocity media landscape, and a lot of fear, it’s tempting to look for guidance from those who are quickest to offer commentaries, even when they don’t have much previous knowledge about the far right. A good number of these commentators are liberal journalists and academics who are primarily concerned with what they understand as “extremism” or “populism”; they see right-wing movements as aberrations rather than as manifestations of ruling relations. As a result, their analyses do not provide us with the tools we need to build meaningful opposition.

Thankfully, there’s no need for any of us to pretend to be experts about the right or to rely on weak analyses. Instead, we can learn from rigorous researchers, grounded in the left, who have been closely following right-wing organizing in North America for years and, in some cases, decades. I look especially to the team at Political Research Associates, Daryle Lamont Jenkins at One People’s Project, Matthew Lyons and other contributors at Three Way Fight, and journalists Shane Burley and Jason Wilson. There’s also much we can learn from left-wing academic scholarship on movements of the right, including the work of Kathleen Blee, Sara Diamond, Mike King, Joe Lowndes, Daniel Martinez HoSang, Alexandra Minna Stern,  and Alexander Reid Ross.

These researchers are part of a long history of courageous and principled people who have tracked right-wing organizing and violence, and worked to challenge far-right formations. In North America, this history has its origins in Black-led anti-lynching campaigns, perhaps most famously associated with Ida B. Wells, and militant working-class anti-fascist groups of the 1920s and 1930s, frequently connected to larger left-wing organizations. During the 1980s and 1990s, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and then Anti-Racist Action coordinated across regions to carry on this work. Today there are anti-fascist and anti-racist groups across the continent that diligently track far-right activities; It’s Going Down and the Torch Network regularly share a lot of that grassroots research.

While there is a lot for us to learn from this work, I want to highlight three points that we miss if we only read quick takes. First, these researchers encourage us to take right-wing movements seriously as movements rather than dismissing them as elite-led “astroturf” initiatives or cult-like “hate” groups. During the 1990s, Sara Diamond was quite critical of liberal groups that portrayed Christian Right organizations as corporate fronts. “It is no great surprise,” she writes in her book Not By Politics Alone, “that rich people finance institutions that will preserve the status quo. Yet the centrist watchdog groups opposed to the Christian Right play a game of ‘exposing’ the names of the Right’s rich donors as if that somehow explains the success of a social movement. It does not.” In her own research, Diamond focused on the activities, cultures, and politics – the movement infrastructure – that sustained these organizations.

In a more recent elaboration, Matthew Lyons notes, “The people who join these movements are not especially crazy or irrational or stupid or fanatical or mindless puppets – although unfortunately these are all common stereotypes. Right-wing movements attract and keep supporters because they speak to people’s hopes, fears, grievances, and human struggles. They may do that in a twisted and ugly way, but they do it – or they don’t last.” In short, we shouldn’t let our political criticisms of right-wing movements cloud our ability to understand the actual organizing work they do.

Second, these researchers challenge simplistic conceptions of the far right as homogeneous or unified, revealing competing and sometimes contradictory tendencies. During the explosion of far-right activity in 2017, Lyons documented the substantial differences in gender ideology between the Christian Right and the alt-right, underlining the latter’s embrace of more aggressive forms of misogyny. Writing in the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol takeover, Joe Lowndes and Daniel Martinez HoSang examine “the disavowal of openly racist language” by sections of the far right and the ways in which Trump’s base “has expanded to include more rather than fewer voters of color.”

A key site of tension within right-wing movements is in their orientations toward dominant power structures. Researchers distinguish between right-wing politics that are “oppositional” (seeking to overthrow the existing order) versus “system-loyal” (aiming to preserve it or return it to some imagined past). These two broad orientations, Lyons explains, “may clash with each other or work together, and people can move from system-loyalty to oppositional politics or vice versa, the same way that leftists can move between reformism and a revolutionary stance.” What is clear is that right-wing movements are dynamic, politically diverse, and internally contentious; they’re not monolithic.

Finally, these researchers offer us a way to orient ourselves, on the radical left, as we confront right-wing movements. After all, we are not system-loyal either; we have no commitment to preserving the current organization and administration of power in our society. But unlike the oppositional right, our fight is for collective liberation. We seek to overturn ruling relations and institutions that produce domination, exploitation, and oppression. We aim to create a world in which everyone – not just the rich, not just white people, not just people with citizenship status – can flourish.

In order to do this, we need to be real about our opponents. We have to challenge, as Three Way Fight argues, “both the established capitalist order and an insurgent or even revolutionary right, while recognizing that these opponents are also in conflict with each other.” This means going beyond caricatures and quips. We can out-organize the far right, but only if we’re serious about understanding them.

I’m so excited about the new Remaking Radicalism collection edited by Dan Berger and Emily Hobson and published by University of Georgia Press! This incredible resource gathers more than 100 essential documents from U.S.-based radical movements active between 1973-2001. And alongside these documents, a whole bunch of super-smart activists contributed “snapshots” – short pieces tracing movement histories during this period. I feel honored to have a piece included on the history of the global justice movement, one part of what Robin Kelley aptly calls “the long 1990s.”

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

People whose names we will never know propelled liberatory struggles of the past. With plenty of contradictions and messiness, they fought oppression and exploitation, nurtured freedom dreams, and won victories that we sometimes take for granted today. For the most part, they were neither rich nor famous, nor did they become rich or famous through their movement efforts.

The same is true for those engaged in struggles right now. The current configuration of popular culture and education, however, produces confusion about this basic fact. And unfortunately, this confusion – along with a whole set of accompanying habits – has a corrosive impact on our movements today.

Where does this confusion come from? Much of it has to do the dominant approach to history-telling, which focuses on individual heroic figures – usually men – as the primary agents of change. Although this approach has long been discredited, it still significantly structures how most people learn and talk about the past. In classrooms, news, and entertainment, we are taught that positive social changes have come through the benevolence of the rich and powerful rather than as contingent outcomes of struggle.

When struggle is acknowledged, as with the U.S. civil rights movement, it’s frequently represented through what activist scholar Dean Spade calls “obscuring fictions” about social movements and social change. Spade’s recent writing on radical mutual aid organizing – clearly in conversation with Big Door Brigade, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, and other grassroots initiatives – helpfully examines these representations and their consequences. In an article for Social Text, he explains, “Such representations center charismatic individuals and hide the realities of mass participation and coordination that does not produce careers or notoriety for most participants.”

These representations, Spade emphasizes, grow out of dominant hierarchies of value and visibility related to work. This is a key feminist insight: in our current social arrangements, the labor of care – whether cooking, minding children, supporting people having hard times, mediating conflicts, or coordinating logistics – is feminized and often devalued and unrecognized.

“Social movements,” writes Spade, “reproduce these hierarchies, valuing 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. Forms of celebrity similarly circulate within movements. It is glamorous to take a selfie with Angela Davis, but it is not glamorous to do weekly or monthly prison visits. The circulation of dominant hierarchies of valuation inside movement spaces shapes how people imagine what it means to participate in work for change, who they want to meet, and what they want to do and be seen doing.”

This dynamic has a corrosive double-sided impact on movements. On the one hand, the bulk of crucial organizing effort – overwhelmingly involving care and frequently not in the public spotlight – goes unrecognized and unappreciated. Longtime organizer Harsha Walia puts it bluntly: “most of the web of frontline movement work is invisible, especially in our social media age.” And because it’s so often made invisible, we don’t have the necessary discussions at the necessary scale about how to share, sustain, and improve it. This weakens our efforts.

On the other hand, when our movements reproduce dominant hierarchies of value and visibility, they skew our perceptions about what’s important. As activists and organizers, we can come to focus more on how we are seen individually than on what we are doing together. Writing a decade ago for Upping the Anti, RJ Maccani highlighted the concept of “protagonismo” from Mexican autonomous movements as a way to understand this challenge. He defines this as “the problem within movements (or society as a whole) of people taking credit for work that is not theirs, the problem of self-promotion over promotion of the struggle, of placing one’s own recognition or fame over the growth of the movement.”

This is not simply a personal failing or a toxic form of ambition. The current organization and administration of power in our society fosters an individualistic, acquisitive, self-promotional orientation. Culturally, we can see this in the pervasive “cult of entrepreneurship,” proliferating forms of media-propelled celebrity status, and Hollywood representations of social movements. As Maccani explains, “this internalized dimension of capitalism has us ever fighting to ‘get ahead’ in school, at work, and even in the movement, and forgetting the ways in which such structural privileges and oppressions as class, race, gender, citizenship, sexuality, and social currency, are warping the form and face of our organizing.” This is a dead end.

Thankfully, there is an alternative. Instead of creating individual brands, we can aim to build collectivities in struggle. This, writes Spade in his new book Mutual Aid, “means cultivating a desire to be beautifully, exquisitely ordinary just like everyone else. It means practicing to be nobody special. Rather than a fantasy of being rich and famous, which capitalism tells us is the goal of our lives, we cultivate a fantasy of everyone having what they need and being able to creatively express the beauty of their lives.”

The best history-telling can help us to do this. I think here of Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and The Black Freedom Movement, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done, Emily Thuma’s All Our Trials, and Scott Neigh’s Talking Radical books. Although focusing on many different efforts, all of these books share stories of the hard, consistent, beautiful, rarely-flashy work of people struggling for collective liberation. There’s much we can learn from these stories and many others akin to them.

Let’s strive to be the ordinary, the nobodies special, the ones who care, build, and fight without any likelihood of fame or fortune – that is to say, those who make history together.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was not the first time in U.S. history that an electoral shift to the right emboldened far-right forces in the streets. To take one example, the Ku Klux Klan endorsed Ronald Reagan in his presidential run in 1980 and white supremacist groups grew much more ambitious with his election. In response, the 1980s and 1990s saw a lot of anti-racist and anti-fascist organizing, and there is much to learn from those experiences. Hilary Moore and James Tracy’s book No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements, published earlier this year by City Lights Books, helps us to access some of this recent instructive history. They tell the story of one of the most militant white anti-racist formations of that period, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. With significant leadership from lesbians, John Brown chapters across the U.S. – frequently working closely with Black and Brown organizations – confronted fascists in prisons, schools, neighborhoods, police departments, punk scenes, and the streets. As Robin Kelley notes in the foreword, “They saw themselves as comrades, not allies, in a life-and-death struggle to stop fascism in its tracks.” And many involved in the Committee helped to lay the groundwork for the contemporary movement against the prison industrial complex. Making use of activist publications, news coverage, and interviews with former members, Moore and Tracy trace the trajectory of the Committee and distill concrete lessons for today’s organizing efforts.

I learned so much in 2018 while offering editorial feedback on an early version of the manuscript that became this book. The final version is even better. I recommend it!

Here’s one gem from Moore and Tracy’s book:

What happens when the state is unable or unwilling to respond to racist violence? No-platforming is one such form of forceful action that the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee waged to successfully deny racist ideas from spreading. Though controversial, it remains a strategy worth studying and learning from today. Activists who want to confront the right on these terms should do so with an understanding of how racists have adapted their own strategies over time. Through the use of social media, they have honed victimization to an art. They continue to portray their political opponents as intolerant authoritarians, and themselves as patriotic defenders of civil liberties. This position has become harder to defend as right-wing terrorism has escalated. The most effective method to deprive them of this propaganda tool is through strategic flexibility. There are times when physical self-defense is absolutely critical and others when mass mobilizations are truly the most effective approach. Following the example of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, the surest way to know the difference is to build organizations able to make strategy, analyze conditions, and recuperate from mistakes.

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

The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing a lot about the current capacities of social movements and communities in struggle. Much of this is hopeful, as people across North America are organizing workplace actions, resistance to prisons and detention centers, combative protests against racist police violence, rent strikes, and community-based mutual aid initiatives. It’s also inspiring to see emerging collaborative efforts to generate political vision for moving forward in the midst of deepening crises.

At the same time, this pandemic illuminates significant challenges facing our organizing efforts. One of these came up clearly at the recent Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, held online this year. In a generative session on “Collective Care vs. Containment,” an activist from Mali asked the featured speakers how anarchists in North America are thinking about mutual aid beyond the borders of the U.S. and Canada.

This is a pressing question for all of us committed to collective liberation. As activist-scholar Adam Hanieh writes: “It is not enough to speak of solidarity and mutual self-help in our own neighbourhoods, communities, and within our national borders – without raising the much greater threat that this virus presents to the rest of the world…. Without a global orientation, we risk reinforcing the ways that the virus has seamlessly fed into the discursive political rhetoric of nativist and xenophobic movements – a politics deeply seeped in authoritarianism, an obsession with border controls, and a ‘my-country first’ national patriotism.” Hanieh is right: this pandemic requires movement responses and relations at a scale well beyond the nation-state.

The “global orientation” that Hanieh emphasizes is what has been known, historically, as “internationalism” on the left. While it has taken different forms, the basic idea is working across national borders to offer tangible solidarity in struggles against oppression and exploitation and for dignity and self-determination. In a useful 2015 editorial on this topic, activist journal Upping the Anti poses a fundamental question animating internationalism: “While we organize for liberation close to home, what is our role in getting others free – especially when the governments and economies in North America cause so much exploitation and harm abroad?”

Underlying this orientation is an understanding that successfully challenging ruling systems requires building movements that connect, communicate, and collaborate globally. This is the substance of the slogan from the global justice movement of the 1990s and early 2000s: “let our resistance be as transnational as capital.”

Over the last decade, experienced radical organizers have talked more frequently about the decline of left internationalism. Upping the Anti sums this up as “a retreat in continued, cultivated forms of international solidarity from various grassroots activists and labour unions in North America.” Compared to even the movement activities of the 1980s and 1990s – such as the anti-apartheid movement, Latin American solidarity efforts, global AIDS activism, and anti-war mobilizations – this retreat is unmistakable. In a recent webinar hosted by Briarpatch, activist-scholar Nandita Sharma put it starkly: “we’re living in a time where the left is the least internationalist (for lack of a better term) than perhaps at any other time in our history.”

How should we understand this decline in left internationalism in the U.S. and Canada? I have yet to see a rigorous account. That said, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this decline has happened amidst the accelerating hardships coming out of the 2007-2008 global economic crisis. A lot of people have, understandably, been focused on immediate struggles for survival, and a lot of radical initiatives have become much more domestic in practice.

In addition, many activists and organizers experienced intense demoralization after the historic anti-war mobilizations of the early 2000s failed to prevent unfathomably devastating U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Over the last couple of decades, there have also been impactful discussions on the left about the problems of activism that focuses only on faraway places while ignoring injustices closer to home.

This decline has not been absolute. Many Indigenous peoples, as Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson emphasizes, have long practiced elaborate forms of internationalism in relation to other human and nonhuman nations. Whether in defense of Standing Rock or Wet’suwet’en territory, recent Indigenous-led efforts have built on these practices, fostering international relations in joint struggles against colonial dispossession and ecological devastation. Internationalism includes solidarity among and with Indigenous nations, even within the colonial borders of nation-states.

There have been other internationalist efforts in recent years. Palestine solidarity organizing has been growing, particularly since the launch of the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign in 2005. As the Kurdish freedom movement has propelled a revolution in Northeastern Syria, activists have developed solidarity groups. There are radical diasporic efforts, such those mobilizing in solidarity with struggles in India against the far-right BJP government. In the labor movement, there are some small but stalwart initiatives, such Labour Against the Arms Trade and U.S. Labor Against the War. There are also significant internationalist dimensions in current organizing around migrant justice and climate justice, especially those activities that center struggles in the global south.

If we want to revive a global orientation in our movements, all of these efforts are worth building on, as we also learn from previous initiatives. And if any moment calls for a revitalization of internationalism, it is this one. As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies crises from Guatemala to Gaza, the stakes grow higher by the day. Radical historian Mike Davis observes that we’re currently witnessing “a kind of triage of humanity where wealthy countries have retreated from even the pretense of moral obligations to the poorer countries.” The only force that will change that is collective and resolute international solidarity in action.

Internationalism is also about hope. This is something that socialist-feminist organizer and theorist Sharmeen Khan has consistently argued. “In terms of dealing with despair,” she writes, “one of the things that really helped me was becoming more of an internationalist…. Things may be very frantic, but if you can talk to people around the world who are doing good work, it is a way to keep going…. My fight includes them and really helps me work through that despair.”

In concert with people around the world doing good work, we can resist despair and isolation. We can build strong relations, individually and collectively, across movements and borders. We can recognize our responsibilities, rooted where we are, in getting one another free. We can win a new world by winning across the world.

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

Increasingly, activists and organizers are discussing the question, “What’s your theory of change?” For the most part, this is positive. As climate justice organizer and activist-scholar Jen Gobby explains, a theory of change lays out our thinking about “how we will make change in the world and why we think it will work.”

At its best, this conceptual framework offers us a way to talk together about large-scale strategy for social transformation: What is our vision of a just, equitable, and habitable world? What will it take, concretely, to achieve that vision? Who will have to be involved and how?

In this time of intensifying political and ecological crisis, many people are digging into these kinds of questions and hungrily looking for useable answers. I believe this is part of the reason for the immense popularity of two recent books by people with substantial movement experience: adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy and Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts.

Although speaking to fairly distinct parts of the left, both brown and McAlevey offer ways of explicitly naming and examining ideas about how social change happens. It doesn’t surprise me at all that so many activists and organizers are eagerly reading their books, attending their presentations and workshops, and grappling with their ideas.

At the same time, some experienced radical organizers express exasperation – sometimes publicly, frequently privately – with the “theory of change” framework. They point out that “having a theory of change” has become a not-so-helpful trend within the culture of progressive nongovernmental organizations and professional activism.

I’m sympathetic to this critique. A particular approach to “theory of change” – with its own specialized jargon and metrics – has indeed become influential in the worlds of social work, international development, and philanthropy in the last few decades. At its worst, this approach can limit our abilities to strategize for achieving victories beyond narrow conceptions of what presently seems “winnable” or “feasible.” Just as bad, this approach can make strategic planning seem like something that only professionals can and should do.

But the idea of “theory of change” didn’t originate in these contexts, and we should not cede the ground of developing strategy to professionals. If we want to win a world we can all inhabit, we are the ones who should strategize, together, about how to get there. In fact, social movements and communities in struggle have been deliberating about goals and plans for as long as people have been fighting domination. And at various points, movement-based formations have worked to systematize ideas about how social change happens.

One of these formations was Movement for a New Society (MNS), a U.S.-based radical feminist and pacifist organization active in the 1970s and 1980s. As Andrew Cornell details in his book Oppose and Propose!, MNS was organized through city-based collectives and played a leading role in the direct action wing of the so-called “anti-nuke movement,” which mobilized against nuclear power and the nuclear arms race. MNS’ influential organizing handbook Resource Manual for a Living Revolution, first published in 1977, begins with tools, questions, and exercises for “how to develop a theory of change.”

The MNS authors write, “In the past, discussions of theory and strategy tended to be dominated by an elite who planned campaigns and informed the majority about them. We believe that an understanding of the theoretical basis for change needs to be spread widely among participants, to encourage a democratic, decentralized movement for change.” Toward this end, MNS worked to develop movement-based study/action groups in which participants collaboratively explored ideas about social change, investigated actual campaigns, and reflected on their own activities.

The critique that MNS offered is still relevant. While the organizational landscape of the left has changed dramatically in the last forty years, there is still is a lot of elitism and specialization in strategic planning. And not surprisingly, social relations of oppression and benefit – based on Indigeneity, race, class, gender, ability, citizenship, and sexuality, among others – substantially shape who participates and how.

For this reason, I’m enthusiastic about bottom-up, collective discussion of theories of change. This is something that Jen Gobby has helped to create in recent years as she has interviewed and facilitated discussion groups with climate justice activists and Indigenous land defenders across the Canadian context. Her forthcoming book More Powerful Together shares these conversations and invites all of us to engage them.

One of the most useful things about these kinds of discussions is that they encourage us to examine what we take for granted. As Gobby observes, “Our understandings of change often remain in the shady realm of unstated assumptions, rather than being pulled out into the light of day for rigorous debate, scrutiny, and reflection. By remaining in the realm of unspoken assumptions, they (1) can render our strategies for change less effective and (2) can create tensions between agents of change who hold conflicting, yet unspoken ideas about change.”

Let’s embrace this spirit of rigorous collective reflection and build shared theories of change adequate to our moment.

My anarchist mentor Ruth Sheridan died on January 11, 2020, in Anchorage. The friendship and comradeship that she and I sustained over three decades, based in shared politics and deep love, profoundly shaped my life. Whenever I talk about sticking around in struggle, I invoke Ruth. I’m including here a short contribution I wrote for the celebration of her life at the Unitarian Church in Anchorage on what would have been her 102nd birthday, January 25, 2020.

I first encountered Ruth Sheridan in 1991, when I was thirteen years old. One of my teachers at Steller Secondary School had invited her to come speak about her experiences of labor organizing and social justice activism. I was immediately captivated by her description of the Industrial Workers of the World, and this contributed to me seeking to learn more about the history of radical social movements.

In the following years, I came to know Ruth better through her involvement with Alaskans Concerned About Latin America (ACALA). I encountered her at public events and was moved by how welcoming she was. When I contributed an article to the ACALA newsletter (the first time I had ever published anything), her positive feedback motivated me to do more.

Based on these experiences, I formally asked Ruth to serve as my mentor, in 1994, in helping me to prepare to teach a course to fellow students at Steller on anarchism. Her advice was invaluable. But what was more significant was the friendship we developed. Ruth brought so much respect and interest toward my ideas and questions, and I came to see her as an incredible resource of knowledge and experience.

I moved away from Anchorage in 1995 and I have only lived in Alaska for three yearlong stints since then. However, this never prevented Ruth and me from maintaining a lively friendship. While I completed a PhD on social movement history in California, she provided consistent encouragement. She and I also re-united at activist events in the Lower 48, and I made a point of spending time with her during all of my annual visits to Alaska. She always eagerly asked for my reports on activist efforts outside of Alaska, and I always looked forward to hearing her updates about politics in Alaska. We never ran out of topics to discuss.

Ruth Sheridan is my model for aging and sticking around in struggle for social transformation. She had boundless energy, an insatiable interest in ideas and history, a deep commitment to social justice and mutual aid, and profound care and respect for people without concern for status or power. She taught me how, as the Spanish anarchists used to say, to carry a new world in my heart.