Another Politics by Chris Dixon

Author:Chris Dixon
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520279018
Publisher: University of California Press

THE “ALL THE SAME” FALLACY

The second flawed conception around leadership is that we’re all the same. The central idea here is that people come into nonhierarchical groups with more or less the same skills, kinds of knowledge, and levels of confidence. Anti-authoritarians share an aspiration that everyone should be able to participate equally in making decisions and carrying out plans, and we frequently assume that the way to put this into practice is to proceed as though everyone is already pretty much capable of doing everything or will quickly figure it out. For the most part, activists and organizers correctly understand that skills, knowledge, and confidence are forms of power. But we don’t have clear ways to acknowledge or appreciate these kinds of power and how they affect which leadership roles—if any—an individual takes on. In denying leadership, then, we frequently pretend that everyone in our projects and organizations is similar in terms of what they can do, what they know, and how they feel about their abilities—or at least, similar enough that we don’t need to devote much energy to developing these capacities.

Sharmeen Khan, a longtime organizer and editor of Upping the Anti in Toronto, talked about this conception as “the assumption that we’re walking into this equal.” But, she argued, this doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening. In fact, people come into movement spaces with vast differences between them. Clare Bayard, an organizer in San Francisco with the Catalyst Project, elaborated on this point: “People not only have different life experiences in terms of what they bring in organizing experiences and their perspectives and their understanding, but [they] also have had different amounts of mentoring, of study, of really thinking things through, of doing their own visioning or strategizing.” Rahula Janowski, another San Francisco organizer, offered the specific example of political experience: “How can someone who’s been in the movement for ten years and been in the organization for three years operate on the same level as someone who’s been in the movement for two years and the organization for two months? It just is completely unrealistic.” The reality is that, as Bayard concluded, “We all actually are bringing different things to the table.”

The notion that “we’re all the same” is a fallacy. In accepting and sustaining it, we confuse acknowledging differences in skills, knowledge, and confidence with justifying such differences and the power bound up in them. In some cases, anti-authoritarians see even the act of identifying differences in ability as inherently oppressive, as if naming power relations somehow creates or maintains them. In this way, the “all the same” fallacy feeds on our silence: when we don’t talk about differences, we don’t have to confront their crucial implications and the challenges they pose for our organizing. But ignoring them doesn’t make them go away. On the contrary, the conception that “we’re all the same” creates persistent problems.

Joshua Kahn Russell, reflecting on his experiences as a founding organizer with the new SDS, talked helpfully about some of these

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