Common Preservation in Action
Macroeconomics Meets the Polycrisis
by Jeremy Brecher, originally published 02 November 2024 on Labor Network for Sustainability’s Strike! Commentaries, accessible here: https://www.labor4sustainability.org/articles/macroeconomics-meets-the-polycrisis/ Listen to the audio version >> The convergence of crises now often … Read More »
Great Power Struggle Over Fragmented Global Networks
by Jeremy Brecher, originally published 12 October 2024 on Labor Network for Sustainability’s Strike! Commentaries, accessible here: https://www.labor4sustainability.org/articles/great-power-struggle-over-fragmented-global-networks/ Listen to the audio version >> The global convergence … Read More »
Review: Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity
by Don Wells, originally published 27 August 2003 online and in the Journal of Industrial Relations Volume 57, Number 3, Summer 2002, p. 585–587, accessible online here: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ri/2002-v57-n3-ri546/006895ar/ Download Article Here … Read More »
What Ever Happened to Globalization?
by Jeremy Brecher, originally published 27 September 2024 on Labor Network for Sustainability’s Strike! Commentaries, accessible here: https://www.labor4sustainability.org/articles/what-ever-happened-to-globalization/ Listen to the audio version >> Globalization has been the hallmark of … Read More »
Katrina Poses the Question: What Are the Duties of Governments to Their People
by Jeremy Brecher, originally published in Hurricane Katrina: Response and Responsibilities edited by John Brown Childs, published by New Pacific Press, 2005 Download Article Here … Read More »
Labour Faces Keystone XL and Climate Change
by Jeremy Brecher, originally published in A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice edited by Toban Black, Stephen D'Arcy, Tony Weis, and Joshua Kahn Russell, published by PM Press, 2014 Download Article Here … Read More »
“A breath-taking manuscript: I am overwhelmed and beginning to think how I can integrate this into my teaching. [An] enormous contribution to the advancement of know how for common preservation.”
“A breath-taking manuscript: I am overwhelmed and beginning to think how I can integrate this into my teaching. [An] enormous contribution to the advancement of know how for common preservation.”
“Over the last decades Jeremy Brecher has known how to detect the critical issue of a period, to sort the many realities of suffering and injustice and to emerge with a clear, short, powerful description. He does it again in this important book--it is about people, how our system devalues people and what needs to be done.”
“I have been an advocate, a student, and a teacher of advocacy for more than forty years, but I have never learned more useful knowledge about advocacy than from this book. It is absolutely unique in its integration of engaging personal narratives of the author’s direct involvement in every significant social justice movement of the last forty years with his analytic history of previous movements.”
This book tells the story of a group of factory workers, housewives, parishioners, and organizers who tried to create an alternative to the economic powerlessness manifested in the closing of dozens of factories in the Naugatuck Valley region.
Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
If Seth Thomas doesn't get you
Plume and Atwood must.
This book is dedicated to the people of the Naugatuck Valley, who have educated me, sustained me, and taken me unto them as their pet outsider. I can truly say of the valley, as Herman Melville' Ishmael said of his whale ship, that it has been my Yale College and my Harvard.
"If all the people in a city are banded together to make it a better place to live, then it will be a better place to live. That's what the Naugatuck Valley Project is all about."
"I think the Naugatuck Valley Project is an embryonic sign of what has to develop in the future on a much broader basis for this society to survive and be strong."
“This is a remarkable book: part personal story, part intellectual history told in the first person by a skilled writer and assiduous historian, part passionate but clearly and logically argued plea for pushing the potential of collective action to preserve the human race. Easy reading and full of useful and unforgettable stories about what ordinary humans from around the globe can do and have done to improve the condition of their lives. A medicine against apathy and political despair much-needed in the U.S. and the world today.”
"This is an indispensable book that everyone concerned about the human future needs to read and act upon. It offers a fascinating blend of political autobiography, manual for
social change, and illuminating account of the shifting agenda of progressive politics, giving cogent primacy to the stark goal of human preservation. With species survival at stake, what Jeremy Brecher writes is at once frightening and inspiring."
“It is an amazing piece of work indeed, accomplishing the unimaginable, to paraphrase the Port Huron Statement. The blend of personal experience, collective memories, social analysis, and indications of possible ways out of our current disastrous state is impressive.”
“One of America's most admired activist-scholars shines his light on the path
forward, reminding us that social change is both possible and urgent.”
"The most important story of the past half century is that of ordinary people organizing to transform the way society looked at workers, unjust war, women, people of color, and the environment. Jeremy Brecher's life and book tell this story with a passion and comprehensiveness that make this a must read for fans of justice."
ABOUT JEREMY BRECHER
You and I may not know each other, but I suspect there are some problems that we share -- problems like climate change, war, and injustice. For half a century I have been participating in and writing about social movements that address those problems. The purpose of this website is to share what I've learned. I hope it provides something of use to you in addressing our common problems.
For the record, I am the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements. I have written and/or produced more than twenty video documentaries. I have participated in movements for nuclear disarmament, civil rights, peace in Vietnam, international labor rights, global economic justice, accountability for war crimes, climate protection, and many others.