Abstract
Following the Occupy encampments in September 2011, interest has been rekindled in its immediate predecessor, the global justice movement. Disentangling the lineage of these movements is an undertaking that requires cultural geographers as much as political geographers, as the wide interest in questions of justice and inequality today demonstrates. Thus, the so-called global justice movement still haunts the present moment as exemplified by a number of recent publications.
Within Another Politics, activist-scholar Chris Dixon ‘discuss[es. . .] one tendency in a growing landscape of North American anti-statist, anti-capitalist politics composed of various anarchist and left communist tendencies’ and refers to it as ‘the anti-authoritarian current’. Rather than describing the radical traditions that compose the global justice movement in their entirety, Dixon effectively delineates the current out of what is often seen as an amorphous assemblage. No turtles, no teamsters here. But there is a layer of self-identified anti-authoritarians spread across North America who participate in an assortment of movement activities, including the US Social Forum, prison abolition, anti-poverty, and radical ecology. What unites these anti-authoritarians is a shared approach based on what Dixon calls the ‘The Four Anti’s’ – anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism, anti-oppression, anti-imperialism – and prefigurative politics. Without a party apparatus, institutions, or even a movement journal, this current is best described as a cultural outgrowth of the 1990s and varying, if not contradictory, radical influences. Rather than a shared ideological position, these self-identified anti-authoritarians share affect, affinity, age cohort, and a terminological dialectic while maintaining relations to the dominant culture as well as radical sub- and counter-cultures. These are its defining characteristics. Another Politics progresses through the currents influences, its strategic orientation, and its organized expression.
Dixon is an extremely generous scholar as he weaves his text around interviews with movement participants. The book offers readers a meticulous account of these organizing cultures in addition to the thought processes, decision-making mechanisms, and application of historical reflections and theoretical concepts in a contemporary social movement. Another Politics would be improved by considering the spatial and contextual differences between those interviewed, as San Francisco is not Montreal nor New Orleans, and so on. Furthermore, how particular histories summarized in the first chapter produce the anti’s and prefigurative politics in the second and third chapters, and in turn influence the strategies and organizing that make up the bulk of the text, is imprecise. How these ideas are produced and deployed require additional clarification. These problems are, possibly, the result of the author’s aforementioned generosity and the task of generating a popular text within an academic context for an academic publisher.
Cultural geographers will find utility in the detailed descriptions of the circulation of ideas and how this can produce particular organizational initiatives and spaces. Those interested in a chronology of the global justice movement in North American during these years or an epistemological investigation into the theoretical sources for said movement will not find those here. Though, it might serve a more important purpose: suggesting organizational forms and approaches to confront the neoliberal University.