Download or read book The Debt Resisters Operations Manual written by George Caffentzis and published by . This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last 30 years, wages have stagnated and average household debt has more than doubled. People are forced to take on debt to meet their everyday needs like housing and education, leading to devastated communities and an increasing reliance on credit to maintain basic living standards. This system enriches the lives of few at the expense of many. The Debt Resisters' Operations Manual is a handbook for debtors everywhere to understand how the debt system really works, while providing practical tools for fighting debt in its most exploitative forms.
Download or read book Debt Resisters Operations Manual written by Strike Debt and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last thirty years, as wages have stagnated across the country, average household debt has more than doubled. Increasingly, we are forced to take on debt to meet our needs—from housing, to education, to medical care. The results—wrecked lives, devastated communities, and an increasing reliance on credit to maintain our basic living standards—reveal an economic system that enriches the few at the expense of the many. The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual is a handbook for debtors everywhere to understand how this system really works, while providing practical tools for fighting debt in its most exploitative forms. Inside, you’ll find detailed strategies, resources, and insider tips for dealing with some of the most common kinds of debt, including credit card debt, medical debt, student debt, and housing debt. The book also contains tactics for navigating the pitfalls of personal bankruptcy, and information to help protect yourself from credit reporting agencies, debt collectors, payday lenders, check cashing outlets, rent-to-own stores, and more. Written and edited by a network of activists, writers, and academics from Occupy Wall Street, additional chapters cover tax debt, sovereign debt, the relationship between debt and climate, and an expanded vision for a movement of mass debt resistance.
Download or read book The Debt Resisters Operations Manual written by Strike Debt (Movement) and published by Common Notions. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For debtors everywhere who want to understand how the system really works, this handbook provides practical tools for fighting debt in its most exploitative forms. Over the last 30 years as wages have stagnated across the country, average household debt has more than doubled. Increasingly, people are forced to take on debt to meet their needs; from housing to education and medical care. The results--wrecked lives, devastated communities, and an increasing reliance on credit to maintain basic living standards--reveal an economic system that enriches the few at the expense of the many. Detailed strategies, resources, and insider tips for dealing with some of the most common kinds of debt are covered in this manual, including credit card debt, medical debt, student debt, and housing debt. It also contains tactics for navigating the pitfalls of personal bankruptcy, as well as information on how to be protected from credit reporting agencies, debt collectors, payday lenders, check-cashing outlets, rent-to-own stores, and more. Additional chapters cover tax debt, sovereign debt, the relationship between debt and climate, and an expanded vision for a movement of mass debt resistance.
Download or read book In and Out of Crisis written by Greg Albo Albo and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study of the financial meltdown, renowned radical political economists lay bare the roots of the crisis in the inner logic of capitalism itself. Objective and detailed, this account provocatively challenges the call for a return to a largely mythical golden age of economic regulation as a check on finance capital. In addition, it deftly illuminates how the era of neoliberal free markets has been, in practice, under-girded by state intervention on a massive scale. Arguing for genuinely transformative alternatives to capitalism, and discussing how to build the collective capacity to realize these goals, this record is a critique of the crisis and an indispensable springboard for a renewed political left.
Download or read book Can t Pay Won t Pay written by Collective Debt and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debtors have been mocked, scolded and lied to for decades. We have been told that it is perfectly normal to go into debt to get medical care, to go to school, or even to pay for our own incarceration. We’ve been told there is no way to change an economy that pushes the majority of people into debt while a small minority hoard wealth and power. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that mass indebtedness and extreme inequality are a political choice. In the early days of the crisis, elected officials drew up plans to spend trillions of dollars. The only question was: where would the money go and who would benefit from the bailout? The truth is that there has never been a lack of money for things like housing, education and health care. Millions of people never needed to be forced into debt for those things in the first place. Armed with this knowledge, a militant debtors movement has the potential to rewrite the contract and assure that no one has to mortgage their future to survive. Debtors of the World Must Unite. As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful.
Download or read book Organizing Cools the Planet written by Hilary Moore and published by PM Pamphlet. This book was released on 2011 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organizing Cools The Planet weaves together stories, analysis, organizing tools, and provocative questions, to offer a snapshot of U.S. climate activism and provide pathways for readers to participate in it. Authors share hard lessons learned, reflect on strategy, and grapple with the challenges of their roles as organizers who do not come from ?frontline” communities, but work to amplify and build a climate justice movement led by low-income people, communities of color, Indigenous, youth and other constituencies most directly impacted by the crisis. Rooted in the authors' experiences organizing in local, national, and international arenas, this pamphlet grapples with the challenges and overwhelming odds young activists face today. Organizing Cools the Planet challenges readers to look at the scale of ecological collapse with open eyes, without falling prey to disempowering doomsday narratives. It asks key pressing questions for those who wish to take our generational challenge seriously. This pamphlet is for anyone who wants to build a movement with the resiliency to navigate one of the most rapid transitions in human history.
Download or read book Zombies Migrants and Queers written by Camilla Fojas and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to work through the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She also examines how these artifacts illuminated parts of society usually kept off-screen or on the margins even as they defaulted to stories of white protagonists.
Download or read book Global Slump written by David McNally and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Slump analyzes the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism. It argues that—far from having ended—the crisis has ushered in a whole period of worldwide economic and political turbulence. In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, Global Slump challenges the view that its source lies in financial deregulation. The book locates the recent meltdown in the intense economic restructuring that marked the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Through this lens, it highlights the emergence of new patterns of world inequality and new centers of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these produced. Global Slump offers an original account of the “financialization” of the world economy during this period, and explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession, particularly in the Global South. Analyzing the massive intervention of the world’s central banks to stave off another Great Depression, Global Slump shows that, while averting a complete meltdown, this intervention also laid the basis for recurring crises for poor and working class people: job loss, increased poverty and inequality, and deep cuts to social programs. The book takes a global view of these processes, exposing the damage inflicted on countries in the Global South, as well as the intensification of racism and attacks on migrant workers. At the same time, Global Slump also traces new patterns of social and political resistance—from housing activism and education struggles, to mass strikes and protests in Martinique, Guadeloupe, France and Puerto Rico—as indicators of the potential for building anti-capitalist opposition to the damage that neoliberal capitalism is inflicting on the lives of millions.
Download or read book Until the Rulers Obey written by Clifton Ross and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2014-02-15 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the Rulers Obey brings together voices from the movements behind the wave of change that swept Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century. These movements have galvanized long-silent—or silenced—sectors of society: indigenous people, campesinos, students, the LGBT community, the unemployed, and all those left out of the promised utopia of a globalized economy. They have deployed a wide range of strategies and actions, sometimes building schools or clinics, sometimes occupying factories or fields, sometimes building and occupying political parties to take the reins of the state, and sometimes resisting government policies in order to protect their newfound power in community. This unique collection of interviews features five dozen leaders and grassroots activists from fifteen countries presenting their work and debating pressing questions of power, organizational forms, and relations with the state. They have mobilized on a wide range of issues: fighting against mines and agribusiness and for living space, rural and urban; for social space won through recognition of language, culture, and equal participation; for community and environmental survival. The book is organized in chapters by country with each chapter introduced by a solidarity activist, writer, or academic with deep knowledge of the place. This indispensable compilation of primary source material gives participants, students, and observers of social movements a chance to learn from their experience. Contributors include ACOGUATE, Luis Ballesteros, Marc Becker, Margi Clarke, Benjamin Dangl, Mar Daza, Mickey Ellinger, Michael Fox, J. Heyward, Raphael Hoetmer, Hilary Klein, Diego Benegas Loyo, Courtney Martinez, Chuck Morse, Mario A. Murillo, Phil Neff, Fabíola Ortiz dos Santos, Hernán Ouviña, Margot Pepper, Adrienne Pine, Marcy Rein, Christy Rodgers, Clifton Ross, Susan Spronk, Marie Trigona, Jeffery R. Webber, and Raúl Zibechi.
Download or read book Health Care Revolt written by Michael Fine and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2018-09-01 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. does not have a health system. Instead we have market for health-related goods and services, a market in which the few profit from the public’s ill-health. Health Care Revolt looks around the world for examples of health care systems that are effective and affordable, pictures such a system for the U.S., and creates a practical playbook for a political revolution in health care that will allow the nation to protect health while strengthening democracy. Dr. Fine writes with the wisdom of a clinician, the savvy of a state public health commissioner, the precision of a scholar, and the energy and commitment of a community organizer.
Download or read book Re enchanting the World written by Silvia Federici and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silvia Federici is one of the most important contemporary theorists of capitalism and feminist movements. In this collection of her work spanning over twenty years, she provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. In her clear and combative voice, Federici provides readers with an analysis of some of the key issues and debates in contemporary thinking on this subject. Drawing on rich historical research, she maps the connections between the previous forms of enclosure that occurred with the birth of capitalism and the destruction of the commons and the “new enclosures” at the heart of the present phase of global capitalist accumulation. Considering the commons from a feminist perspective, this collection centers on women and reproductive work as crucial to both our economic survival and the construction of a world free from the hierarchies and divisions capital has planted in the body of the world proletariat. Federici is clear that the commons should not be understood as happy islands in a sea of exploitative relations but rather autonomous spaces from which to challenge the existing capitalist organization of life and labor.
Download or read book From Crisis to Communisation written by Gilles Dauvé and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Communisation” means something quite straightforward: a revolution that starts to change social relations immediately. It would extend over years, decades probably, but from Day One it would begin to do away with wage-labour, profit, productivity, private property, classes, States, masculine domination, and more. There would be no “transition period” in the Marxist sense, no period when the “associated producers” continue furthering economic growth to create the industrial foundations of a new world. Communisation means a creative insurrection that would bring about communism, not its preconditions. Thus stated, it sounds simple enough. The questions are what, how, and by whom. That is what this book is about. Communisation is not the be-all and end-all that solves everything and proves wrong all past critical theory. The concept was born out of a specific period, and we can fully understand it by going back to how people personally and collectively experienced the crises of the 1960s and ’70s. The notion is now developing in the maelstrom of a new crisis, deeper than the Depression of the 1930s, among other reasons because of its ecological dimension, a crisis that has the scope and magnitude of a crisis of civilisation. This is not a book that glorifies existing struggles as if their present accumulation were enough to result in revolution. Radical theory is meaningful if it addresses the question: How can proletarian resistance to exploitation and dispossession achieve more than aggravate the crisis? How can it reshape the world?
Download or read book Witness to the Revolution written by Clara Bingham and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The electrifying story of the turbulent year when the sixties ended and America teetered on the edge of revolution NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH As the 1960s drew to a close, the United States was coming apart at the seams. From August 1969 to August 1970, the nation witnessed nine thousand protests and eighty-four acts of arson or bombings at schools across the country. It was the year of the My Lai massacre investigation, the Cambodia invasion, Woodstock, and the Moratorium to End the War. The American death toll in Vietnam was approaching fifty thousand, and the ascendant counterculture was challenging nearly every aspect of American society. Witness to the Revolution, Clara Bingham’s unique oral history of that tumultuous time, unveils anew that moment when America careened to the brink of a civil war at home, as it fought a long, futile war abroad. Woven together from one hundred original interviews, Witness to the Revolution provides a firsthand narrative of that period of upheaval in the words of those closest to the action—the activists, organizers, radicals, and resisters who manned the barricades of what Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden called “the Great Refusal.” We meet Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground; Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department employee who released the Pentagon Papers; feminist theorist Robin Morgan; actor and activist Jane Fonda; and many others whose powerful personal stories capture the essence of an era. We witness how the killing of four students at Kent State turned a straitlaced social worker into a hippie, how the civil rights movement gave birth to the women’s movement, and how opposition to the war in Vietnam turned college students into prisoners, veterans into peace marchers, and intellectuals into bombers. With lessons that can be applied to our time, Witness to the Revolution is more than just a record of the death throes of the Age of Aquarius. Today, when America is once again enmeshed in racial turmoil, extended wars overseas, and distrust of the government, the insights contained in this book are more relevant than ever. Praise for Witness to the Revolution “Especially for younger generations who didn’t live through it, Witness to the Revolution is a valuable and entertaining primer on a moment in American history the likes of which we may never see again.”—Bryan Burrough, The Wall Street Journal “A rich tapestry of a volatile period in American history.”—Time “A gripping oral history of the centrifugal social forces tearing America apart at the end of the ’60s . . . This is rousing reportage from the front lines of US history.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “The familiar voices and the unfamiliar ones are woven together with documents to make this a surprisingly powerful and moving book.”—New York Times Book Review “[An] Enthralling and brilliant chronology of the period between August 1969 and September 1970.”—Buffalo News “[Bingham] captures the essence of these fourteen months through the words of movement organizers, vets, students, draft resisters, journalists, musicians, government agents, writers, and others. . . . This oral history will enable readers to see that era in a new light and with fresh sympathy for the motivations of those involved. While Bingham’s is one of many retrospective looks at that period, it is one of the most immediate and personal.”—Booklist
Download or read book The Debt Project written by Brittany M. Powell and published by Graphic Arts Books. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FEATURED IN THE NEW YORKER: The Faces of Americans Living in Debt Finalist for the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize in Documentary. Featured on Politico, in the Washington Post, the Daily Mail, and the Huffington Post, USA Today, Business Insider, Refinery29, and Fast Company. Based on the popular online photo series and now published in print for the first time, The Debt Project collects 99 portraits of debt across the United States, featuring people of all different backgrounds and stories, to recontextualize an often stigmatized experience. In 2013, Brittany Powell made the difficult decision to file for bankruptcy for her photography business. In the years following the 2008 economic collapse, she found herself in a significant amount of debt, a position many Americans across the country still share, a common yet isolating and private experience often steeped in shame. Her personal experience, bolstered by the We Are the 99% slogan that came out of the Occupy movement, brought her to start The Debt Project, an exploration of the role debt and finance plays in our personal identity and social structure. This book presents an intimate look into 99 different lives: each shares an arrestingly honest portrait in the person’s home, surrounded by all their belongings, accompanied by a handwritten note of the amount of debt that person is in and the story behind the numbers. The Debt Project, with a foreword by writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor plus resources at the back of the book to support people in debt, examines the social and personal hold financial debt has on us and invites others into a private world, while at the same empowering people to share their stories and overcome the shame they may feel.
Download or read book Deep Green Resistance written by Derrick Jensen and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years, Derrick Jensen has asked his audiences, "Do you think this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life?" No one ever says yes. Deep Green Resistance starts where the environmental movement leaves off: industrial civilization is incompatible with life. Technology can't fix it, and shopping—no matter how green—won’t stop it. To save this planet, we need a serious resistance movement that can bring down the industrial economy. Deep Green Resistance evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare, and the conditions required for those options to be successful. It provides an exploration of organizational structures, recruitment, security, and target selection for both aboveground and underground action. Deep Green Resistance also discusses a culture of resistance and the crucial support role that it can play. Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win.
Download or read book In Letters of Blood and Fire written by George Caffentzis and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Marx remarked that the only way to write about the origins of capitalism is in the letters of blood and fire used to drive workers from the common lands, forests, and waters in the sixteenth century. In this collection of essays, George Caffentzis argues that the same is true for the annals of twenty-first-century capitalism. Information technology, immaterial production, financialization, and globalization have been trumpeted as inaugurating a new phase of capitalism that puts it beyond its violent origins. Instead of being a period of major social and economic novelty, however, the course of recent decades has been a return to the fire and blood of struggles at the advent of capitalism. Emphasizing class struggles that have proliferated across the social body of global capitalism, Caffentzis shows how a wide range of conflicts and antagonisms in the labor-capital relation express themselves within and against the work process. These struggles are so central to the dynamic of the system that even the most sophisticated machines cannot liberate capitalism from class struggle and the need for labor. Themes of war and crisis permeate the text and are given singular emphasis, documenting the peculiar way in which capital perpetuates violence and proliferates misery on a world scale. This collection draws upon a careful rereading of Marx’s thought in order to elucidate political concerns of the day. Originally written to contribute to the debates of the anticapitalist movement over the last thirty years, this book makes Caffentzis’s writings readily available as tools for the struggle in this period of transition to a common future.
Download or read book Accompanying written by Staughton Lynd and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2012-11-26 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Accompanying, Staughton Lynd distinguishes two strategies of social change. The first, characteristic of the 1960s Movement in the United States, is “organizing.” The second, articulated by Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, is “accompaniment.” The critical difference is that in accompanying one another the promoter of social change and his or her oppressed colleague view themselves as two experts, each bringing indispensable experience to a shared project. Together, as equals, they seek to create what the Zapatistas call “another world.” Staughton Lynd applies the distinction between organizing and accompaniment to five social movements in which he has taken part: the labor and civil rights movements, the antiwar movement, prisoner insurgencies, and the movement sparked by Occupy Wall Street. His wife Alice Lynd, a partner in these efforts, contributes her experience as a draft counselor and advocate for prisoners in maximum-security confinement.
