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Book Review

Inside The Resurgence Of Jewish-Led Palestine Solidarity

April 2, 2025 Shane Burley, Waging Nonviolence. , , , ,
Over the last year and a half, the movement for Palestinian liberation has become one of the largest American social movements of the decade. Not only that, there has also been an incredible resurgence of the Jewish left, as Jewish Palestine solidarity organizations, such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, organize a growing contingent of young Jews for an end to the genocide in Gaza. As Israel violates its ceasefire agreement and commences an aggressive bargaining campaign, one that killed 400 people in the first night, this movement is only going to grow as the world collectively reckons with the destruction that has been caused.

A People’s History Of San Francisco’s Most Notorious Neighborhood

April 1, 2025 Steve Early, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Few San Francisco neighborhoods have had more ups and downs than the 33-block area still called “The Tenderloin”—a name which derives from the late 19th century police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking their best cuts of beef in lieu of cash bribes. At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studies, and professional boxing gyms. 

Welcome To ‘Think Like A Commoner’

March 1, 2025 David Bollier. , , ,
About a year ago, some folks in Bangkok reached out to me. Hans van Willenswaard and his wife Wallapa wanted to translate my book Think Like a Commoner into Thai and publish it. Hans is the founder of the Innovation Network International in Thailand, and his wife Wallapa is a social entrepreneur and founder of the Mindful Markets movement. Both have been quite involved in the commons for some time. I was thrilled by their request, but upon re-reading the original version of my book, published in 2014, I was dismayed to realize that parts of it felt outdated.

Celebrating Collective Courage

January 28, 2025 Malikia Johnson, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
In 2014, the seminal book, Collective Courage: A History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice debuted, and with it a flame sparked in the cooperative movement. Slowly and then exponentially the book went viral by word of mouth throughout black and brown communities across the U.S. and beyond. It was a “how-to” for self-determination and making an impact in the world that was tangible. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard’s book gave us both the answer to a viable alternative outside of petitions and protests and provided a blueprint for how our ancestors, names both widely known and unknown, paved a path toward cooperative economics.

Politically Corrupt And Morally Bankrupt

December 27, 2024 Helen Mercer, Portside. , , , , ,
Jeff Schuhrke's book is a history of the collaboration between trade union leaders and the US state through the Cold War up until the 2000s. It provides a detailed account of the dealings of key figures in the leadership of the American Federation of Labour (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) with the US political establishment and the CIA, earning the name “AFL-CIA.” Schuhrke exposes the labyrinth of personal contacts, committees, and associations through which the US government channelled funds and shaped labour organisations across the world.

Los Angeles Tenant Union Founders’ Call To Action

October 14, 2024 Roshan Abraham, Next City. , , , , , ,
Tracy Rosenthal and Leo Vilchis first met in 2012 through an activist art project in Los Angeles called the School of Echoes. The project took Vilchis, Rosenthal and others to six different L.A. communities on listening tours to hear residents’ concerns. The concerns they encountered were largely about displacement, gentrification and the feeling that people were being pushed from their communities. Their attempt to address these problems led to the creation of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which has a membership of 3000 due-paying households. And over the past 9 years, the pair has worked alongside some of the union’s local chapters to coordinate some of the most public, and often successful, organizing fights on behalf of tenants in the country.

Bargaining Is An Organizing Opportunity

October 11, 2024 Al Davidoff, Labor Notes. , , ,
After we won our union, in our first round of bargaining (in 1981) we had a seven-member bargaining committee representing over 1,000 workers. We relied heavily on our UAW rep. Initially they did all the talking. We were too afraid we would say something wrong. But in subsequent bargaining we made changes based on the belief that the formal bargaining process should be seen as an organizing and leadership development opportunity, not some isolated world where the experts resolved issues. First we expanded to a 10-person core bargaining team. Second, we made sure that each member of the bargaining committee spoke, starting from the very first session.

How Pandemic-Era Prison Life Shows The Stakes Of Abolition

September 17, 2024 Justin A. Davis, Waging Nonviolence. , , , , ,
A few months before COVID became a permanent part of life in the U.S., the New York City Council approved a plan to shut down the infamous jail complex known as Rikers Island and replace it with four smaller facilities. (That plan was later delayed — and city officials have since acknowledged that they likely won’t meet the plan’s legal deadline.) The vote to close Rikers Island came from years of extensive grassroots organizing by reformists and abolitionists alike. But for those left caged there in 2020, the risks posed by COVID were immediate — not just illness and death, but new forms of the isolation, neglect and violence that already shape life inside. 

Takeover! A Human Rights Approach To Housing

September 13, 2024 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Cheri Honkala and the Poor People’s Army, also known as the Poor People’s Campaign for Economic Human Rights, produced their book about how to take over abandoned federal properties. In the City of Philadelphia, where the Poor People’s Army is based, scholar Elsa Noterman reports that there are 10 abandoned properties for every single homeless person. Nevertheless, the wait times to receive public housing are years long. Their neighborhood, Kensington, has been devastated by factory closures since the passage of NAFTA. “Call to Movement: The Politics of Love,” the first section of the introduction to TAKEOVER!, is inspiring, heartrending and, like the rest of the book, beautifully written.

How To Be A Nonviolent Second-Wave Feminist

June 20, 2024 Eleanor J. Bader, The Indypendent. , , ,
During the 1970s and 1980s, many feminists pushed the armed forces to allow women to serve in combat. Many also organized to demand that police forces diversify and bring more women and people of color into their ranks. But this segment of the women’s movement did not represent everyone. A  smaller but hugely vocal constituency opposed violence, militarism, police expansion and colonialism, and argued that an equal opportunity to maim or kill would do nothing to create the equitable societies they sought to build. Unfortunately, their efforts often get short shrift in historical accounts of the era. The anthology, Feminism, Violence and Nonviolence zeroes in on the influence of pacifist thought on Second Wave feminism.

‘Power Lines—Building A Labor-Climate Justice Movement’

June 15, 2024 Steve Early, Convergence. , , ,
A familiar scene played out in the city council chambers of Richmond, California on May 22, 2024. For the last 20 years, since members of the anti-Chevron Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) first got elected to the council, any measure before that body affecting the city’s largest employer and business tax payer has been hotly debated. Local environmental justice organizations, like Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) mobilize their working-class members to attend and sign up to speak during the time allotted for “public comment.” To rebut the resulting complaints about pollution and arguments for stronger health and safety protection, the $290-billion company that operates Richmond’s massive 122-year-old refinery deploys its own defenders.

How Reformers Doubled Vermont AFL-CIO Membership

May 23, 2024 Gordon Simmons, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
Transforming an existing union into a more democratic and member-run organization has often proven to be a daunting—though possible—task. The pressing need to revitalize organized labor in the U.S., however, depends on such movements. Beginning in 2017, a slate of reform-minded union activists won leadership offices in the Vermont state federation of labor, reinvigorating that organization. Within just a few years, the federation’s membership doubled. Insurgent Labor: The Vermont AFL-CIO, 2017-2023 is two-term president David Van Deusen’s participant-retelling of the emergence of the UNITED reform group.

Putting Members First: Ron Carey’s Lessons For Labor Movement Reform

April 2, 2024 Steve Early and Rand Wilson, Popular Resistance. , , , ,
Books about union presidents are usually penned by professional writers -- either academic historians, labor journalists, or paid flacks. Past accounts of the life and work of labor organization chiefs like John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, Jimmy Hoffa, or Cesar Chavez have run the gamut from hagiographic to constructively critical. Few have had a biographer whose view of their leadership role is rooted in first-hand experience as a blue-collar worker in the same industry and union. Ken Reiman’s personal connection to the subject matter of Ron Carey and the Teamsters (Monthly Review Press, 2024) resulted from his own career as a UPS driver and activist in the local union that Carey led before becoming president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the 1990s.

What Is Anti-Racism? And Why It Means Anti-Capitalism

March 10, 2024 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. , , , ,
In 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer arrested George Floyd, threw him to the ground, and pressed a knee into his neck, murdering him by asphyxiation. In response, “Black Lives Matter” protests erupted across the US, and it briefly appeared as if a racial reckoning might be taking place. However, its meaning was soon appropriated by Amazon, Walmart, and other prominent corporations declaring that Black lives mattered and dedicating funds to diversity training and other efforts that amounted to no more than what Black Agenda Report has long criticized as putting “Black faces in high places.”

Fighting Wall Street’s War On Workers

March 2, 2024 Steve Early, Labor Notes. , , , ,
One of the occupational hazards of being a labor activist is over-exposure to “corporate bullshit”—on the job, in the community, and in politics. When workers try to win collective bargaining rights, employers conduct propaganda campaigns to spread every imaginable falsehood about the union. Once forced into negotiations, management shows up at the bargaining table with a new line of BS about not being able to afford union wage demands or agree to a grievance procedure. And in the legislative-political arena, corporate interests have long used disinformation to thwart labor campaigns.
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