A ‘Draw The Line’ march in Toronto, September 20, 2025. Photo by Sarah Hassanein/Flickr.

For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World Chris Dixon Between the Lines, 2026

For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World

Between the Lines, 2026

With his new book, For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World, Chris Dixon provides a useful study of the varied factors that undermine the capacity of movements and activists to maintain sustained forms of struggle. He also offers practical and well-considered proposals on how to counter such obstacles and impediments.

No one could accuse the author of advancing flimsily constructed notions about how to create more durable and effective methods of operating. He draws on a considerable body of personal knowledge and experience, refers to an impressive range of organizations, campaigns and actions, and his book is brimming with examples and insights.

As an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) for almost three decades, I dealt with many of the same challenges that are central to this book. Questions of how you need to conduct your work so as to develop inclusive and dynamic forms of organizing are of great importance. Acting in ways that maximize sustained involvement by those who participate is vital. Working together so as to avoid perpetuating within your movement many of the forms of oppression you wish to challenge is decisive.

However, whenever such issues were under discussion in OCAP, I always thought it important to be clear that the fundamental factors that stand in the way of sustained movements of social resistance are not reducible to our forms of organizing or our internal structures. There are larger societal forces at work that can only be overcome in exceptional periods of social upsurge.

It would be a mistake, in my view, to suggest that our struggles would be thriving and the participants in them would stay the course if only we conducted our work in different ways. The fundamental barriers to winning forms of struggle are external social and political factors and not organizational matters, as important as those are.

Before tackling this critical point, it is important to take stock of the obstacles to movement building that Dixon wrestles with and the remedies he proposes. Those who are involved in social resistance will undoubtedly have pondered these very issues, and the book offers considerable food for thought in this regard.

Building durable movements

The idea of the “long haul” is in the title for good reason. At the outset, Dixon makes clear that he wants to help counter “the strikingly consistent challenges we face in sustaining movements.” Here, he distinguishes between “structural” factors “that are substantially shaped by how power is presently organized and administered” and “internal” considerations that are “rooted in movement cultures: habitual ways of doing things, as activists and organizers, that feel customary but all too often sabotage our activities.”

Though Dixon by no means disregards the structural factors, his focus is very clearly on the internal dynamics. Each chapter explores particular issues related to building durable movements that are worthy of consideration and that grapple with the harsh realities of establishing the perspectives, approaches and organizational forms that can help us to resist in a society that wants to stifle such efforts.

The first chapter explores the question of “how we can hold a sense of urgency while pacing ourselves for the long haul.” Dixon argues that “to hold a long........

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