Common Preservation: In a Time of Mutual Destruction
PM Press has published my latest book, which can be purchased directly through PM. Here is an excerpt from their web page:
As world leaders eschew cooperation to address climate change, nuclear proliferation, economic meltdown, and other threats to our survival, more and more people experience a pervasive sense of dread and despair. Is there anything we can do? What can put us on the course from mutual destruction to common preservation? In the past, social movements have sometimes made rapid and unexpected changes that countered apparently incurable social problems. Jeremy Brecher presents scores of historical examples of people who changed history by adopting strategies of common preservation, showing what we can we learn from past social movements to better confront today’s global threats of climate change, war, and economic chaos.
In Common Preservation, Brecher shares his experiences and what he has learned that can help ward off mutual destruction and provides a unique heuristic—a tool kit for thinkers and activists—to understand and create new forms of common preservation.
Strike! 50th Anniversary Edition
PM Press has published my latest book, which can be purchased directly through PM. Here is an excerpt from their web page:
Since its original publication in 1972, no book has done as much as Strike! to bring U.S. labor history to a wide audience. Now this fiftieth anniversary edition brings the story up to date with chapters covering the “mini-revolts of the twenty-first century,” including Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for Fifteen. The new edition contains over a hundred pages of new materials and concludes by examining a wide range of current struggles, ranging from #BlackLivesMatter, to the great wave of teachers’ strikes “for the soul of public education,” to the global “Student Strike for Climate” that may be harbingers of mass strikes to come.
Save the Humans? Common Preservation in Action
PM Press has published my latest book, which can be purchased directly through PM. Here is an excerpt from their web page:
We the people of the world are creating the conditions for our own self-extermination, whether through the bang of a nuclear holocaust or the whimper of an expiring ecosphere. Today our individual self-preservation depends on common preservation—cooperation to provide for our mutual survival and well-being.
For half a century Jeremy Brecher has been studying and participating in social movements that have created new forms of common preservation. Through entertaining storytelling and personal narrative, Save the Humans? provides a unique and revealing interpretation of how social movements arise and how they change the world.
For those seeking an understanding of social movements and an alternative to denial and despair, there is simply no better place to look than Save the Humans?
Climate Solidarity: Workers vs. Warming
Labor Network for Sustainability and Stone Soup Books, originally published this workbook on labor4sustainability.org, and you can download it for free.
Climate Solidarity addresses the issue that workers have no greater interest than to prevent the destruction of the earth’s climate on behalf of themselves and their posterity. But workers often act as an organized force to oppose climate protection measures in the name of their interests as workers. How is such a paradoxical state of affairs possible? How did we get in such a state? How can we change it? How can the working class reorganize itself to fight for climate protection? Climate Solidarity: Workers vs. Warming proposes answers to these questions.
Climate Solidarity presents a vision for the labor climate movement. It offers a comprehensive and at times provocative view of the past, present, and future of organized labor and climate change. It provides a substantive analysis for leaders and activists in the labor climate movement. It presents a well thought out, historically informed analysis both of climate change and of organized labor. Climate Solidarity will be read and discussed by those who will shape labor’s response to the climate crisis.
Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual
PM Press has published my latest book, which can be purchased directly through PM. 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
Download Climate Insurgency here
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.
Common Sense for Hard Times
Download Common Sense for Hard Times here
In the early 1970s I met Tim Costello, a truck driver and union activist, and began a forty-year collaboration. In 1973 we spent a summer travelling across the US interviewing young workers. The result was the book Common Sense for Hard Times, which combined the insights gleaned from more than 100 interviews with young workers with interpretation of the historical forces that shaped their lives.
Global Visions
We have little experience of how to live as one world. In this book, people from diverse geographical and social origins grapple with how to turn our globalizing world into a common home. Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order is designed to help initiate a dialogue which will establish globalization-from-below as a new paradigm for understanding and reshaping the world order.
Root & Branch
In 1969, a group of collaborators, all admirers of the work of Paul Mattick, including Paul Mattick, Jr., Stanley Aronowitz, Peter Rachleff, and myself began sporadically publishing a magazine and pamphlet series called Root & Branch drawing on the tradition of workers councils and adapting them to contemporary America. In 1975 we published the collection Root & Branch: The Rise of the Workers’ Movements.
Brass Valley
“An excellent study of the brass workers of the Naugatuck Valley… weaves the views of participants and charts, statistics, and excellent photographs into a rich narrative. Recommended.”
—Library Journal.