In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis—political, economical, and environmental—and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. A vibrant, inspirational force, Boggs has participated in all of the twentieth century’s major social movements—for civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and more. She draws from seven decades of activist experience, and a rigorous commitment to critical thinking, to redefine “revolution” for our times. From her home in Detroit, she reveals how hope and creativity are overcoming despair and decay within the most devastated urban communities. Her book is a manifesto for creating alternative modes of work, politics, and human interaction that will collectively constitute the next American Revolution.

    The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms.Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers’ People’s Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent.The Black Panther Party’s understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy—and that struggle—continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.

    Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements of the sixties go by. James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the era for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. They show that poor and working-class radicals, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and 1970s. Among these groups: +  JOIN Community Union brought together southern migrants, student radicals, and welfare recipients in Chicago to fight for housing, health, and welfare . . .  +  The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry organized self-identified hillbillies, Chicago greasers, Vietnam vets, and young feminists into a legendary “Rainbow Coalition” with Black and Puerto Rican activists . . .   +  In Philadelphia, the October 4th Organization united residents of industrial Kensington against big business, war, and a repressive police force . . .  + In the Bronx, White Lightning occupied hospitals and built coalitions with doctors to fight for the rights of drug addicts and the poor. Exploring an untold history of the New Left, the book shows how these groups helped to redefine community organizing—and transforms the way we think about a pivotal moment in U.S. history.

    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.

    Those who live in these sacrifice zones are forced to shoulder the burden of harmful environmental effects so that others can prosper. Mountains of Injustice broadens the discussion from the city to the country by focusing on the legacy of disproportionate environmental health impacts on communities in the Appalachian region, where the costs of cheap energy and cheap goods are actually quite high.Through compelling stories and interviews with people who are fighting for environmental justice, Mountains of Injustice contributes to the ongoing debate over how to equitably distribute the long-term environmental costs and consequences of economic development.Contributors:Laura Allen, Brian Black, Geoffrey L. Buckley, Donald Edward Davis, Wren Kruse, Nancy Irwin Maxwell, Chad Montrie, Michele Morrone, Kathryn Newfont, John Nolt, Jedediah S. Purdy, and Stephen J. Scanlan.

    These emotive messages displayed a range of visual inventiveness and linguistic dexterity (in Arabic, English, and several other languages) that expressed very powerful feelings yet often entertained at the same time. Egyptian amateur photographer Karima Khalil here gathers images taken by herself and others of these messages, showing their great variety, from the simple and repeated Irhal ("Leave"), written in a hundred different ways, to poems, rhyming slogans, puns, jokes, and tributes to the martyrs killed by security forces in the protests. These messages form a compelling visual record of a people's long suppressed hopes and desires.

    Reading through [her writings]... you catch glimpses of a mind of someone who could have been a serious scholar or academic who was overtaken by her conscience and found it impossible to sit back and merely theorize about the terrible injustice she saw around her. These writings reveal a person who is doing all she can to link theory and practice, action and thought. —Arundhati Roy, New DelhiAnuradha Ghandy's life and work stands as an example for a generation of Indian revolutionaries. But more than that she has directly contributed to the development of the Indian revolutionary movement in significant ways. Take the caste issue. Anuradha was one of the new generations of revolutionaries that in practical political activity gained and formulated an insight that helped the movement to move forward from the former narrow economism in the perception of caste of the old CPI to a new and broader understanding of the class role of the superstructure. ...her writing contains much more. It is necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand the present situation in India.

    Contention in Context provides the most extensive effort to date to test the model, analyzing a range of important cases of revolutions and protest movements to identify the role of political opportunities in the rise of political contention.With evidence from more than fifty cases, this book explores the role of the state in protest, the frequent overemphasis on political opportunities in recent research, and the extent to which opportunity models ignore the cultural and emotional triggers for collective action. By examining new directions in the study of protest and contention, this book shows that although political opportunities can help explain the emergence of certain kinds of movements, a new strategic language can ultimately tell us far more.

    The author traces the transformation of the Paraiyars from an 'untouchable' and socially despised community to one that came to acquire prominence in the political scene of Tamil Nadu, especially in early 20th century. Through this framework, the book studies a number of issues: subaltern history, colonial ethnography, agrarian systems, agrarian bondage, land legislations, and the interventions by missionaries and social and political organizations.

    Outsiders question the movement they've come so far to support—and each other—when forced into a world so unlike the poetic communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos—a world of endemic rural poverty, parochialism, and shifting loyalties to the movement. The quiet dignity of the local compañeros and echoes of B. Traven, Joseph Conrad, and Albert Camus round out this epic yarn.Ramor Ryan is an Irish writer and translator based in Chiapas, Mexico, and is the author of Clandestines.

    From his entry into the world of political activism as the founder of Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia University to his departure from public life in order to help build the clandestine resistance to war and racism known as the Weathermen, Gilbert relates all of the victories he has achieved and obstacles he has encountered during his struggle to build a new world. In telling the intensely personal story he is stripped of all illusions and assesses his journey from liberal to radical to revolutionary with rare humor and frankness. A firsthand glimpse into the terrors and triumphs of the 1960s and beyond, Love and Struggle is as candid and uncompromising as its author.

    It reveals how Northern corporate moderates, representing some of the largest fortunes and biggest companies of that era, proposed all three major initiatives and explores why there were no viable alternatives put forward by the opposition.More generally, this book analyzes the seeming paradox of policy support and political opposition. The authors seek to demonstrate the superiority of class dominance theory over other perspectives—historical institutionalism, Marxism, and protest-disruption theory—in explaining the origins and development of these three policy initiatives. Domhoff and Webber draw on extensive new archival research to develop a fresh interpretation of this seminal period of American government and social policy development.

    Groups of workers have refused to let their factories and jobs go without a fight. This short, accessible history is rich with first-hand accounts as well as political analysis.