A Lifelong Organizer Shares Lessons on Sustaining Activism for the Long Haul

Writer and organizer Chris Dixon has his fingers on the pulse of North American grassroots movement. Dixon has extensively and repeatedly traveled throughout North America, talking with people working for social change — engaging with activists concerning their successes and heartbreaks, their frustrations and dreams. His first book, Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements, published in 2014, focused on antiauthoritarian organizers and politics across a range of movements of the 2000s and early 2010s, including migrant justice, prison abolitionism, and Occupy Wall Street. His new book, For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World, focuses on how we can sustain our collective efforts over years of social and political struggle.

Movement elders I am close to — now in their 70s — who maintain radical political commitments developed in their youth, benefitted from both the intense community that formed around movements for Black Power and liberation, the youthful counterculture and the New Left, and anti-war movements, as well as from their own inner convictions that served as an animating passion. For these elders, political engagement is a kind of vocation. Though they continue to maintain relationships with those comrades who are also still alive and committed to political struggle, those vibrant communities they once thrived in are gone. Only their specific commitment to the possibility of freedom and liberation keeps them going.

Coming of age politically in the 1990s, we also had strong bonds of friendship born through relentless organizing meetings, demonstrations, and coalition work. It seemed we could collectively change the world. Thirty years later, only a handful of us remain involved. Why? Why do people stop organizing, beyond and in addition to the realities of acquiring increasing responsibilities as we age? Why do people give up on the possibility of creating fundamental social and structural change together over the long term? How can we cultivate and sustain caring radical communities that support us all, while drawing new people in, or welcoming them back? These are some of the questions Chris Dixon sets out to answer in For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Paul Messersmith-Glavin: Who should read your book?

Chris Dixon: I wrote For the Long Haul as a practical guide with two main audiences in mind. On the one hand, I wanted to warmly welcome people who have recently become involved in radical political efforts, especially those who have joined movement upsurges since 2020. I’m particularly thinking of the Movement for Black Lives and Palestine solidarity organizing, but also renewed labor militancy and collective defense of queer and trans people. A lot of people I talk to who are newer to movements — many but not all of them younger people — are hungry for conversations about how to sustain lifelong political commitments.

On the other hand, I wanted to speak lovingly to my peers — long-time activists and organizers who have been involved in movements for decades. Many of us talk informally with our friends about the challenges we face in staying actively involved on the left. We’re working a lot to pay our bills, reckoning with disabilities and chronic health conditions, and holding significant care responsibilities for kids, elders, and others in our lives. So many of us are deeply exhausted and hungry for realistic advice about how to stay steady in the fight.

I also wanted to sympathetically address people who participated in movements of the left at one time or another and then moved away from active involvement. I know many people who have followed this trajectory. Rather than being moralistic or dismissive, I wanted to remind them that they’re always welcome back. And I wanted to suggest that perhaps, together, we can build some better structures and practices for helping people stay engaged.

You have spent a tremendous amount of time travelling around the U.S. and Canada, listening to on-the-ground organizers. What have you learned?

I have learned a lot! My most intense and sustained travel was connected to the process of writing and then sharing my first book, Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements. In the late 2000s, I spent a bunch of time traveling and interviewing experienced anti-authoritarian organizers, mainly anarchists and abolitionists. That was the basis for Another Politics. In 2014 and 2015, I toured through 40 cities in North America, giving presentations and facilitating workshops based on the book. During that period, the Movement for Black Lives was picking up in significant ways, and there were still reverberations from the movement associated with Occupy Wall Street. Then, in 2016-17, I was again on the road in the U.S., and I participated in mobilizations against the far right in the wake of Trump’s election, including in my home state, Alaska.

I heard a lot about challenges that people were experiencing, especially related to the sustainability of their organizing efforts in increasingly crisis-ridden circumstances, and also in relation to the ordinary difficulties of working together collectively. Many people shared about the challenges of navigating conflict, reckoning with harm, and organizing effectively.

During that time, I learned that there are a lot of people — more than anyone knows, really — earnestly trying to figure out how to make radical change. They are mostly unsung, and sometimes they don’t even think the work they’re doing is important. But I could see that people everywhere are experimenting with modes of organization and methods of struggle motivated by a deeply felt sense that we can change the world.

The COVID pandemic significantly changed my travel practices. I also live with a chronic pain disability that limits what I can do. So, much of my learning from movements since 2020 has involved maintaining ongoing conversations with many friends across North America and an exhaustive practice of following movement-based media. Here I’d say that I’ve learned especially from migrant justice organizing, Indigenous-led fights against resource extraction projects, rank-and-file union organizing efforts, disability justice initiatives, fights for trans dignity and joy, and Palestine solidarity organizing. Key lessons coming out of these struggles have included the importance of collective care practices, of organizing expansively, and of fighting stubbornly.

Stitching all this work together, I came to the five key lessons that ended up each becoming a chapter in For the Long Haul. I put them as imperatives, or invitations, for the chapter titles: cultivate a long view, work with others, care, make plans, and stick around.

What advice do you have for those in the U.S. organizing against authoritarian consolidation and ecological collapse?

This is such a difficult time, full of unfolding catastrophes. Many people respond to these escalating crises with a lot of urgency and a sense that they have to work incredibly hard and all the time, but that they still won’t win. There’s widespread despair, and it’s not unjustified.

I take a lot of inspiration from studying social movement history. For me, it has helped to learn about how people in the past reckoned with overwhelming circumstances and persevered in collective struggle. It’s true that authoritarianism is ascendant globally right now, and it’s true that we’re facing an unprecedented ecological crisis. But people of the past faced and fought in tremendously crisis-ridden circumstances, and we can too. I think, for instance, about the original abolitionist movement fighting chattel slavery; when we organize to abolish the carceral system today, we are building on that legacy. It was a crisis then and it is a crisis now, and people persevered over decades. So, one piece of advice is for us to understand ourselves in history — to cultivate a “long view.” Let’s avoid romanticizing past struggles, but let’s see ourselves in relation to them. Let’s also study them; while there are no recipes, there are lessons.

My other piece of advice might sound kind of basic, but I think it’s crucial: Work with other people. This is both strategic and an antidote to despair. The forces we face are so big, and can be so overwhelming, that we cannot win what we need if we try to go it alone. The only way we’re going to have any hope for large-scale change is by bringing lots of people together in ways that keep growing and building power. For me, this also means intentionally building durable and functional organizations in which people can make plans together, act, build skills and capacities, and take care of one another.

Some people put their faith in the U.S. midterm elections to help stop Trump’s power grabs; to hopefully begin to chart a different course. From your perspective, what role does electoral politics play in affecting dominant power relations? And what difference do you think the midterms will make to the unfolding disaster we find ourselves in?

This is a difficult question. The theory of change that I feel the most confidence about is based on building powerful and combative social movements from below. I think that’s key for challenging and transforming dominant power relations. That’s where I put my organizing energy.

For those waking up to the realities of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and the viciousness of the capitalist economy, what advice do you have to prepare those folks for the long haul that social movement organizing is? What’s your best advice to those newly radicalized to the left?

Part of what I do politically in the city where I live, Ottawa, is supporting other activist groups in building their internal practices and infrastructures. This past summer, while helping to facilitate a planning session for a local organization, I was speaking to someone who is newly politicized in just the way you describe. He initially got involved in organizing against the genocide in Palestine, and he talked about the incredible urgency he felt. He said he also now was feeling it about every new injustice he learned about. He described how overwhelming this was — to encounter these oceans of suffering and to want to struggle against oppression with every ounce of his strength. I get it! I still feel this way three decades after coming into political consciousness myself.

But he was already realizing that if he kept throwing himself into every campaign, he would burn out quickly and perhaps be unable to return. Any of us who’ve been around for a while in movements have seen this pattern, and I talk about it a lot in the book.

My best advice for people who are newly radicalized is to be as intentional as you can. I say this also to my peers who are re-joining movement activity after a period of burn out and to those who are hanging on by their fingernails.

Let me be specific about this. Being intentional means setting priorities about what we’re trying to achieve, making plans for how we’re going to get there, and building structures that help us make collective decisions about workload. My partner has a framed cross-stitch that says, “You can do anything! You can’t do everything!” I think this is not a bad motto for us. Whenever we decide what we’re going to do, we are also deciding some things we’re not going to do. Saying no to some things and setting priorities isn’t actually wrong. It helps us be more focused and effective. It doesn’t guarantee our success, but it increases our chances of winning more often. And of course, often we’re not going to win. So, planning is also about how we set up to carry on and keep building even when we lose.

The other thing I want to emphasize here is that we can’t build sustained movements that assume that everyone will be available 24-7. If you’re holding care responsibilities, scheduling in advance is often necessary. One of the key lessons I take from disability justice efforts, and from my comrades who are parents, is the insight that vibrant movements welcome the full range of contributions and capabilities that people bring, in all of their beautiful differences. But we need to plan for that. This is one practical expression of collective care.

The last thing I’ll say is that in these terrible times, being part of movements really can be the most nourishing way to keep going and refuse despair. I think it’s worth it to do this work, together, for the long haul.