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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.

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.