Download or read book Revolt on Goose Island written by Kari Lydersen and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revised and updated, with a new afterword by the author “There is much talk about ‘audacity’ these days, but true chutzpah is when the workers take over the factory and take on the bank. Kari Lydersen’s invaluable account of the Republic sit-down strike is an instruction manual for worker dignity.” —Mike Davis, author of Buda’s Wagon and City of Quartz December 5, 2008: It wasn’t supposed to work like this. Days after getting a $45 billion bailout from the U.S. government, Bank of America shut down a line of credit that kept Chicago’s Republic Windows & Doors factory operating. The bosses, who knew what was coming, had been sneaking machinery out in the middle of the night. They closed the factory and sent the workers home. Then something surprising happened: Republic’s workers occupied the factory and refused to leave. Kari Lydersen, an award-winning reporter, tells the story of the factory takeover, elegantly transforming the workers’ story into a parable of labor activism for the twenty-first century, one that concludes with a surprising and little-reported victory.
Download or read book Worker Cooperatives and Revolution written by Chris Wright and published by Booklocker. This book was released on 2014-08-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the global popular protests of 2011, more people have begun to wonder and speculate: what’s next for civilization? The economic, social, and political status quo seems unsustainable, but what can emerge to take its place? In this book, a historian examines the past and present to argue that the seeds of a more humane society are already being planted, on local and international scales. Whether they will bear fruit depends, ultimately, on grassroots initiative. Focusing on the new worker cooperative movement in the West, this study not only contains the first systematic discussion of the solidarity economy in the light of Marxist theory; it also introduces a major revision of Marxism that both updates it for the twenty-first century and illuminates our historical moment. It includes an analysis of the history of cooperatives in the U.S., showing where they went wrong and how we can correct their past mistakes. It has a case-study of the successful new worker-owned business New Era Windows in Chicago, which has been celebrated internationally for its defiance of conventional paradigms. And it shows a way out of the age-old conflict between Marxism and anarchism, arguing that both are more relevant now than they have ever been. Which is to say: a gradualist “revolution” is, for the first time, within the realm of possibility.
Download or read book Mayor 1 written by Kari Lydersen and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a city long dominated by a notorious Democratic Machine become a national battleground in the right-wing war against the public sector? In Mayor 1%, veteran journalist Kari Lydersen takes a close look at Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and his true agenda. With deep Wall Street ties from his investment banking years and a combative political style honed in Congress and the Clinton and Obama administrations, Emanuel is among a rising class of rock-star mayors promising to remake American cities. But his private-sector approach has sidelined and alienated many who feel they are not part of Emanuel’s vision for a new Chicago—and it has inspired a powerful group of activists and community members to unite in defense of their beloved city. Kari Lydersen is a Chicago-based journalist, author and journalism instructor who has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Progressive, In These Times, and other publications. She is the author of four books, including The Revolt on Goose Island: The Chicago Factory Takeover and What it Says About the Economic Crisis. She specializes in coverage of labor, energy and the environment. She has taught at Columbia College Chicago and Northwestern University and also works with youth from low-income communities through the program We the People Media. karilydersen dot com.
Download or read book Dancing with Dynamite written by Benjamin Dangl and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grassroots social movements played a major role electing left-leaning governments throughout Latin America. Subsequent relations between these states and "the streets" remain troubled. Contextualizing recent developments historically, Dangl untangles the contradictions of state-focused social change, providing lessons for activists everywhere.
Download or read book Ours to Master and to Own written by Immanuel Ness and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. With specific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, this pathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often underappreciated historical tradition. Ripe with lessons drawn from historical and contemporary struggles for workers’ control, Ours to Master and to Own is essential reading for those struggling to create a new world from the ashes of the old. Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and edits WorkingUSA. Dario Azzellini is a writer, documentary director, and political scientist at Johannes Kepler University in Linz.
Download or read book The End of Protest written by Alasdair Roberts and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States has just gone through the worst economic crisis in a generation. Why wasn’t there more protest, as there was in other countries? During the United States’ last great era of free-market policies, before World War II, economic crises were always accompanied by unrest. "The history of capitalism," the economist Joseph Schumpeter warned in 1942, "is studded with violent bursts and catastrophes." In The End of Protest, Alasdair Roberts explains how, in the modern age, governments learned to unleash market forces while also avoiding protest about the market’s failures. Roberts argues that in the last three decades, the two countries that led the free-market revolution—the United States and Britain—have invented new strategies for dealing with unrest over free market policies. The organizing capacity of unions has been undermined so that it is harder to mobilize discontent. The mobilizing potential of new information technologies has also been checked. Police forces are bigger and better equipped than ever before. And technocrats in central banks have been given unprecedented power to avoid full-scale economic calamities. Tracing the histories of economic unrest in the United States and Great Britain from the nineteenth century to the present, The End of Protest shows that governments have always been preoccupied with the task of controlling dissent over free market policies. But today’s methods pose a new threat to democratic values. For the moment, advocates of free-market capitalism have found ways of controlling discontent, but the continued effectiveness of these strategies is by no means certain.
Download or read book The Class Strikes Back written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-03 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Class Strikes Back examines a number of radical, twenty-first-century workers’ struggles characterised by a different kind of grassroots unionism and solidarity.
Download or read book Class Race and Marxism written by David R. Roediger and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association C.L.R. James Award Seen as a pioneering figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions of identity. This volume collects his recent and new work implicitly and explicitly challenging such a view. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery, in his major essay (with Elizabeth Esch) on race and the management of labor, in his detailing of the origins of critical studies of whiteness within Marxism, and in his reflections on the history of solidarity, Roediger argues that racial division is part of not only of the history of capitalism but also of the logic of capital.
Download or read book New Forms and Expressions of Conflict at Work written by G. Gall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection analyses new forms and expressions of conflict at work under capitalism. Using theoretical and empirical approaches, it demonstrates an underlying historical continuity to new forms and expressions of conflict at work and a path dependency by country and culture.
Download or read book Out of the Sea and Into the Fire written by Kari Lydersen and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Human Faces Behind Globalization--Repression and Resistance North and South of the Border
Download or read book Overcoming Capitalism written by Tom Wetzel and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overcoming Capitalism is a book about strategy, particularly how the powerless can get the upper hand. And it’s written for everyone—not a specialized, self-selected audience. Tom Wetzel carefully explains how capitalism works and how the structure is stacked against us with an eye toward where power lies and how we can tip the scales. The book is a twenty-first century reworking of the approach to unionism. The United States has a dramatic history of workers organizing on the job. In the last 70-odd years labor organizations have made peace with owners, and wages, various protections, and safety has diminished. All during an era that, despite its ups and downs, has been extremely profitable for the ownership class. Wetzel provides a solution to that failure by showing how a democratic outcome can be built into the method of struggle for social change, giving working people the means to ensure they will end up in control of the labor process and the larger society. But this isn’t the old white guy in a hard hat unionism of the previous century. The working class has changed. Life under capitalism has changed. How we think about unionism must also change. While the political and capitalist class wring their hands over the environmental crisis and economic inequality we can see the immediate appeal of a union movement with an expanded mission to wrest control from the wealthy and powerful before they cost-shift us into extinction.
Download or read book Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism written by Maurizio Atzeni and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to work and society for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This new text brings together international experts on work and employment from a range of disciplines to debate key themes and issues related to work in a globalised economy.
Download or read book Transcending Capitalism Through Cooperative Practices written by Catherine Mulder and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcending Capitalism Through Cooperative Practices identifies and analyzes sustainable alternatives to capitalism by examining five diverse enterprises, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Green Bay Packers football team, and the Lusty Lady sex club.
Download or read book Cooperatives Confront Capitalism written by Peter Ranis and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cooperatives the world over are successfully developing alternative models of decision-making, employment and operation without the existence of managers, executives and hierarchies. Through case studies spanning the US, Latin America and Europe, including valuable new work on the previously neglected cooperative movement in Cuba, Peter Ranis explores how cooperatives have evolved in response to the economic crisis. Going further yet, Ranis makes the novel argument that the constitutionally enshrined principle of 'eminent domain' can in fact be harnessed to create and defend worker cooperatives. Combining the work of key radical theorists, including Marx, Gramsci and Luxemburg, with that of contemporary political economists, such as Block, Piketty and Stiglitz, Cooperatives Confront Capitalism provides what is perhaps the most far-reaching analysis yet of the ideas, achievements and wider historical context of the cooperative movement.
Download or read book Migration Work and Citizenship in the New Global Order written by Ronaldo Munck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Any consideration of global migration in relation to work and citizenship must necessarily be situated in the context of the Great Recession. A whole historical chapter – that of neoliberalism – has now closed and the future can only be deemed uncertain. Migrant workers were key players during this phase of the global system, supplying cheap and flexible labour inputs when required in the rich countries. Now, with the further sustainability of the neoliberal political and economic world order in question, what will be the role of migration in terms of work patterns and what modalities of political citizenship will develop? While informalization of the relations of production and the precarization of work were once assumed to be the exception, that is no longer the case. As for citizenship this book posits a parallel development of precarious citizenship for migrants, made increasingly vulnerable by the global economic crisis. But we are also in an era of profound social transformation, in the context of which social counter-movements emerge, which may halt the disembedding of the market from social control and its corrosive impact. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.
Download or read book Cooperatives at Work written by George Cheney and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cooperatives at Work presents a range of success stories in employee ownership and worker cooperative enterprise, showcasing how such firms can embody important and highly contested ideals of democracy, equity, and social transformation.
Download or read book An Alternative Labour History written by Assistant Professor Dario Azzellini and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-03-12 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global financial crisis has led to a new shop-floor militancy. Radical forms of protest and new workers’ takeovers have sprung up all over the globe. In the US, Republic Windows and Doors started production under worker control in January 2013. Later that year workers in Greece took over and managed a hotel, a hospital, a newspaper, a TV channel and a factory. The dominant revolutionary left has viewed workers' control as part of a system necessary during a transition to socialism. Yet most socialist and communist parties have neglected to promote workers' control as it challenges the centrality of parties and it is in this spirit that trade unions, operating through the institutional frameworks of government, have held a monopoly over labor history. Tracing Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune through council communism, anarcho-syndicalism, Italian operaismo, and other "heretical" left currents, An Alternative Labour History uncovers the practices and intentions of historical and contemporary autonomous workers’ movements that until now have been largely obscured. It shows that by bringing permanence and predictability to their workplaces, workers can stabilize their communities through expressions of participatory democracy. And, as history has repeatedly shown, workers have always had the capacity to run their enterprises on their own.
