Book Review, Another politics: talking across todayâs transformative movements

This is a major new work that will be of interest to social movement scholars, political theorists, activists, and all those concerned about the state of the North American Left."Another politics" names a particular current of the larger Left.For Dixon this current is characterized by four "anti's:" anti-authoritarianism, anti-oppression, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism."Another politics" -or what Dixon also calls the "anti-authoritarian current" -has played a significant role in a variety of Left movements from the global justice movement of the 1990s (indeed Dixon was one of the core organizers for the Battle of Seattle in 1999), to the more recent Occupy movement.Influential social movement organizations and networks like No One is Illegal, Critical Resistance, and Rising Tide are also embedded within the anti-authoritarian current.The book is informed by interviews that Dixon conducted with over forty activists in the US and Canada.Dixon does not position himself as an objective collector of activist knowledge; he writes as a longstanding participant.The book's foreword is written by Angela Davis, who is a key influence for Dixon's approach.As Davis reflects in her foreword, a comment that also describes her scholarship: "[Dixon] neither writes about, nor even for, movements and their participants; rather he writes with those movements" (p.xii).Methodologically Another Politics is an application of the "movement-relevant theory" approach that Dixon introduced in an influential Social Movement Studies article written with Doug Bevington in 2005.A key premise of movement-relevant theory is that social movements and activists are vital knowledge producers."We have much to gain," writes Dixon in Another Politics, "when we understand activists and organizers as experts about the struggles in which they are engaged" (p.13).This book is a vital learning tool for those who are not on the front lines of antiauthoritarian activism.It is also invaluable for activists themselves.The book curates and analyzes conversations with anti-authoritarians from across the continent.The core of the book is captured in a simple phrase that Dixon borrows from autonomist Marxist John Holloway: "Against and Beyond."For Dixon "another politics" is characterized by the ongoing effort to simultaneously resist authoritarianism, oppression, capitalism, and imperialism (the against), while prefiguring deep egalitarianism in modes of organization -prefigurative efforts that contain the seeds of another world (the beyond).The key lessons of Another Politics -for antiauthoritarians and the wider Left -flow from Dixon's descriptions of how front-line organizers are navigating the tidal zone between radical vision and concrete struggles.Before getting to these lessons I want to clarify the contours of the anti-authoritarian current that is the focus of Another Politics.Given that the radical Left writ large is at least nominally committed to anti-oppression, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism, the key distinguishing feature of "another politics" is antiauthoritarianism.This translates into opposition to the state-form, along with the pursuit of organizational vehicles and processes that flatten hierarchies and increase the possibility for directly democratic decision-making.But "another politics" is differentiated from a politics of absolute refusal (found in insurrectionary anarchism for instance).For Dixon: "those in this current are attempting to create a political space that is not bound up in the parties or partybuilding of liberals, Leninists, or social democrats; nor in the non-profit and agency sectors, all too often constrained by foundations, state funders, and grant cycles; nor in the insularity and

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