Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual
PM Press has published my latest book, Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual. Here is an excerpt from their web page:
“Before the election of Donald Trump the world was already speeding toward climate catastrophe. Now President Trump has jammed his foot on the global warming accelerator. Is there any way for the rest of us to put on the brakes?
Climate insurgency is a strategy for using people power to realize our common interest in protecting the climate. It uses mass, global, nonviolent action to challenge the legitimacy of public and corporate officials who are perpetrating climate destruction…”
Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival
Twenty-five years of human effort have failed even to slow climate change, let alone reverse it. Climate Insurgency lays out a strategy for protecting the earth’s climate: a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency.
Climate Insurgency starts with a brief history of official climate protection efforts “from above” and non-governmental ones “from below” that explains why climate protection has failed so far. It proposes a global nonviolent insurgency for climate protection to overcome that failure. It outlines the public trust doctrine as a legal basis to legitimate global climate insurgency; shows how to make national economies climate-safe; presents a plan to justly distribute the global costs and benefits of climate protection; and tells how a global insurgency can make governments and economies meet their obligations to protect the climate…
Save the Humans?
As world leaders fail to cooperate to address climate change, nuclear proliferation, economic meltdowns, and other threats to our survival, more and more people experience a pervasive sense of denial and despair. But common preservation can reshape the human future. Jeremy Brecher has seen common preservation in action, and in Save the Humans? he shows how it works. From Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns in India to the Solidarity Movement that initiated the end of East European Communism, to the 2011 uprisings throughout the Middle East and in the U.S. Middle West as well, Brecher shows what we can learn from the history of past social movements to help us confront today’s global threats of climate change, endless war, and economic chaos….
Banded Together
Providing incisive commentary on the historical and contemporary American working class experience, Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley documents a community’s efforts to rebuild and revitalize itself in the aftermath of deindustrialization. Through powerful oral histories and other primary sources, Jeremy Brecher tells the story of a group of average Americans–factory workers, housewives, parishioners, and organizers–who tried to create a democratic alternative to the economic powerlessness caused by the closing of factories in the Connecticut Naugatuck Valley region during the 1970s and 1980s. This volume focuses on grassroots organization, democratically controlled enterprises, and supportive public policies, providing examples from the Naugatuck Valley Project community alliance that remain relevant to the economic problems of today and tomorrow. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with Project leaders, staff, and other knowledgeable members of the local community, Brecher illustrates how the Naugatuck Valley Project served as a vehicle for community members to establish greater control over their economic lives…
In the Name of Democracy
Until recently, the possibility that the United States was responsible for war crimes seemed unthinkable to most Americans. But as previously suppressed information has started to emerge—photographs from Abu Ghraib; accounts of U.S. attacks on Iraqi hospitals, mosques, and residential neighborhoods; secret government reports defending unilateral aggression—Americans have begun an agonizing reappraisal of the Iraq war and the way in which their government has conducted it…
Globalization From Below
When tens of thousands of protestors brought the World Trade Organization in Seattle to a halt in November 1999, it marked the “coming out party” for a new global movement. Trade unionists, environmentalists, students, women’s rights groups, and human rights advocates demanded an alternative to “globalization from above.” As Newsweek commented, “There are now two visions of globalization on offer, one led by commerce, one by social activism.”How can this emerging movement realize its vision? In Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity, Brecher, Costello, and Smith draw on the history of past movements and their own experience as activists to propose strategies for building this powerful coalition into a successful movement for global democratization…
Building Bridges
“Over the past few years, once-insular movements have been reaching out to cooperate at the local level. They have created literally hundreds of coalitions and alliances, large and small, formal and informal. This book presents a few dozen of them: coalitions to support strikes, run movement activists for public office, resist plant closings, secure working women’s rights.”
Global Village or Global Pillage [Book]
“Penetrating analysis . . . crisp and simple language . . . as revealing as it is succinct . . . an effective antidote to the mood of resignation before the omnipotence of transnational business institutions which pervades the political discourse of our times . . . timely and important.”
—David Montgomery, The Nation
Global Village or Global Pillage [DVD]
Global Village or Global Pillage? shows constructive ways ordinary people around the world are addressing the impact of globalization on their communities, workplaces, and environments. It weaves together video of local and transnational activities, interviews, music, and original video comics to show that, through grassroots organizing combined with mutual support around the world, ordinary people can empower themselves to deal with the global economy…
History From Below
In an age when “how to” books deal with self-centered making out, whether in commerce or sex, Jeremy Brecher’s work is astonishing and refreshing; and, God knows, necessary.
History From Below is an exciting primer, enabling “ordinary” people, non-academics, to recover their own personal and community’s pasts. At a time when our history is being officially distorted and profaned, Brecher’s book can be a salubrious antidote: uncovering our true past. Ours, the richest country in the world, is the poorest in memory. In this work lies the way to help cure our national amnesia.
-Studs Terkel
Corwall in Pictures
A Visual Reminiscence 1868-1941
The Cornwall Historical Society announces publication of Cornwall in Pictures—A Visual Reminiscence 1868-1941, with text by Jeremy Brecher, life-long Cornwall resident and Connecticut historian. Published by the Cornwall Historical Society, the book, with a hard-cover cloth binding and 224 pages, contains more than 400 images, mostly photographs from the Cornwall Historical Society’s extensive collection.