There are traits we can cultivate that help us endure in ongoing struggle. This idea surfaced during a 2023 conversation I had with Philadelphia activist Suzy Subways, whose long history in movement work illuminates what it takes to stay engaged. “Don’t measure your impact by how much work you can get done compared with others,” she cautioned, pointing to the corrosive culture of competition that can creep into organizing. “You’re never going to win. There will always be someone who can do more work than you in a given day, or seemingly forever.” And even those who move with great speed can’t sustain that pace forever. “I’ve often seen dynamos for years suddenly hit a wall,” Subways observed. “So, slow and steady wins the race, even though it isn’t a race.”
Although this “slow and steady” notion might feel like common sense from a children’s fable, what does it actually imply for political action? Steadiness means investing care and thought into our efforts, and showing up consistently while following through. The clearest way I understand steadiness is through a trio of ideas I encountered via the Center for Political Education (CPE), a long-running left-leaning institution in San Francisco that provides spaces for learning and resources for movements.
Reliability, finally, is about realistically determining what we can do and then meeting our commitments.
In a 2019 report on their work, CPE emphasized the importance of aiming to be “regular, rigorous, and reliable.” I don’t think they intended this as a universal prescription. Still, this triad—often spoken of as “the three R’s”—provides a useful set of guideposts for our practice.
Regularity, the first, is about consistency. It means moving with a deliberate and sustained rhythm. We bring steadiness to our political work when we make plans and, as much as possible, are intentional about when and how we act. The second, rigor, concerns the standards of quality we set for ourselves. Not to be confused with meeting the formal standards of ruling institutions, it requires us to take our own work seriously. We cultivate steadiness when we set high expectations for our initiatives, carefully determine what we will need (such as resources and timelines) to meet them, and hold ourselves to them. Reliability, finally, is about honestly assessing what we can accomplish and then following through on those commitments. It also means telling others when we cannot. We generate steadiness when we consistently fulfill our own responsibilities and when we work to create collective conditions (such as task-tracking systems and mutual support) that enable others to meet their commitments as well.
To win in meaningful 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.
Steadiness, across all of these dimensions, has implications for how fast we choose to move. There are moments when sprinting is necessary; there are clearly circumstances that demand rapid response. Yet living in a constant state of crisis takes a heavy toll and crowds out space for longer‑term planning and durable action. I keep returning to something Helen Hudson, a longtime anti-prison activist in Montreal, said to me: “I want to be ready to give it my all, to sacrifice things I value, and to take risks when the moment calls for it. But it’s also essential to organize in a sustainable way and to view this as something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.” What would it look like to move at a tempo we can envision sustaining for a lifetime? This is a question we can revisit again and again, and we may be surprised by what we discover.
Steadiness also reframes how we think about urgency. I’ve reflected on an insight from Pat Hussain, one of the founders of Southerners On New Ground (SONG), a multiracial, multigenerational queer- and Black-led organization fighting for racial and economic justice across the US South: “some things we need to do so urgently that we need to slow down.” Hussain shared this in a 2014 interview with Lisa Beard while describing SONG’s founding. She explained, “You can’t have a first meeting again. Once you’ve had that first meeting, and everyone in the room is white, and/or male … there’s no backing up from that. The table has been set, and everyone else is a guest. Not an author. Not a founder. A guest.”
Hussain’s observation points to a sadly familiar pattern in the history of the left: small, relatively homogeneous circles form organizations and campaigns without meaningfully including those most affected by domination in formative decision‑making. This dynamic, often driven by urgency, tends to reproduce harmful social hierarchies and undermines opportunities for coalition across differences. For SONG, slowing down helped them avoid this pitfall.
Hussain’s insight carries broader implications as well. The urgency many of us feel in the face of domination and devastation is warranted; building a just and livable future will require sweeping social transformation on a massive scale. Yet no amount of pressure can deliver this instantly. It will demand protracted struggles that mobilize large numbers of ordinary people, drawing even more people into action and connecting them into powerful new forms of collective power.
While episodic mobilizations can contribute, they won’t suffice on their own. To achieve meaningful victories, we must build and sustain movements—driven by urgency—that operate at a pace we can maintain together for years to come. We will need to hold in tension, at once, a deep sense that current arrangements are intolerable and a steadfast belief that undoing them requires deliberate, often slow, processes.
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Excerpt from For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World by Chris Dixon (AK Press/Between the Lines, 2026).
