In today’s episode, we talk to Sharmeen Khan and Chris Dixon about the difficulties that define organization and movement building. We go over all the different labors that make up organizing and how organizing is about building the capacities and capabilities of as many people as possible.

With our guests, we think through the organizational effects of the bad habits instilled in us by capitalist social relations and that come with us into our “self-organized” spaces. We’ll explore how this will necessarily develop conflicts and the need to meet those with those care and how so much of organizing today has to mean rebuilding cultures of solidarity that neoliberalism has destroyed.

Sharmeen Khan is a longtime community and union organizer out of Toronto, where she’s also a trainer at Tools for Change, an organization that trains people to become better organizers and movement-builders. She’s also an editor at Upping the Anti, a radical journal dedicated to grassroots theory and action. You can find her on Twitter @colonizedmutant. 

Chris Dixon is an educator and organizer in Ottawa, and the author of Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movement, an incredible work that uncovers the problems facing the anti-authoritarian left across the US and Canada and the emerging strategies they’re developing against them. You can find him on Twitter @withmovements.

We’d like to thank Amanda M. Priebe and Tyler Daughn for their artwork and music, respectively.