| Recent decades have seen the convergence of a variety of anti-authoritarian politics and broader-based movements in the U.S. and Canada. Coming out of this convergence, a growing set of activists and organizers---from anti-poverty organizers in Toronto to prison abolitionists in Oakland, from grassroots reconstruction organizers in New Orleans to migrant justice activists in Vancouver---are developing shared politics, practices, and sensibilities based in overlapping areas of work. They are building "another politics," to borrow an expression from the Zapatistas taken up by organizers at the 2007 U.S. Social Forum. Those creating these politics compose a political tendency, what I call "the anti-authoritarian current," which cuts across a range of left social movements. Broadly conceived, what distinguishes this current is its commitment to combining anti-authoritarian politics with grassroots organizing among ordinary people. Based on forty-five in-depth interviews with organizers in six North American cities as well as extensive participant research, this dissertation traces the strands of movement and struggle that have led into the anti-authoritarian current, explores the defining principles of another politics, and examines the political orientations and approaches that are emerging from the activities of this current. Another politics, I argue, illuminates two crucial challenges for contemporary revolutionary theory and practice. First, it highlights the importance of holding together, on the one hand, an active rejection of all forms of domination, exploitation, and oppression, and on the other hand, the construction of emancipatory social relations and forms of social organization through struggle. Second, another politics underlines the significance of organizing and fighting in the disjunctive space between actually existing social realities and transformative aspirations. While the anti-authoritarian current has not resolved these challenges, I suggest that it offers some promising directions for navigating them. |
