For the Long Haul – A book launch with Chris Dixon

In our time of widespread crisis, how do we keep going to transform the world? Drawing on organizing experiences and movement histories, this presentation will distill lessons for developing transformative movements that endure. It will explore collective conditions – such as modes of organization, practices of care, and methods of planning – that enable people to stick around, fight, and build together. It will also open a space to discuss the challenges we face and what we are learning together as we grapple with them.

Sponsored by Punch Up Collective, Carleton University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Octopus Books

More details to come!

About the book:
For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World addresses the question of how to sustain long-term involvement in transformative social movements. It takes up this question with a particular focus on our time of compounding crises and widely-felt urgency. This urgency, the book argues, is absolutely warranted; creating a just and habitable future requires dramatic social transformation on a massive scale.

But we can’t make this happen instantaneously. Instead, changing the world will require large numbers of ordinary people moving into action, bringing more and more people along with them, and constellating powerful new collectivities. To win in significant ways, we will have to build and sustain movements, propelled by urgency, that move at a pace that we can maintain, collectively, for years to come. This is the long haul.

Written in a compact and accessible manner, For the Long Haul takes up the question of activist longevity through five chapter-length propositions. Each chapter names a key obstacle to movement durability and then elaborates practical tools for contending with the obstacle and nourishing long-haul organizing. Focusing on the U.S. and Canada, For the Long Haul is based on interviews with and writings by seasoned organizers, experiences of past and present-day political formations, and a broad range of movement histories.

About the author:
Chris Dixon is an activist, writer, and educator with more than three decades of experience in radical social movements in the U.S. and Canada. Originally from Alaska, he now lives in Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin territory. Dixon is a member of Punch Up Collective and serves on the advisory board for Upping the Anti. Formally trained as a scholar of social movements, his writing has circulated widely and he speaks regularly about strategy, radical organizing, left history, and movement-based research. His first book was Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements. Find him at writingwithmovements.com.