Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! narrates the dramatic story of repeated, massive, and sometimes violent revolts by ordinary working people in America. Involving nationwide general strikes, the seizure of vast industrial establishments, nonviolent direct action on a massive scale, and armed battles with artillery and tanks, this exciting hidden history is told from the point of view of the rank-and-file workers who lived it. Encompassing the repeated repression of workers’ rebellions by company-sponsored violence, local police, state militias, and the U.S. Army and National Guard, it reveals a dimension of American history rarely found in the usual high school or college history course. 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.
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. Brecher traces a path that leads from the sitdown strikes on the pyramids of ancient Egypt through America’s mass strikes and labor revolts to the struggle against economic globalization to today’s battles against climate change. Weaving together personal experience, scholarly research, and historical interpretation, Jeremy Brecher shows how we can construct a “human survival movement” that could “save the humans.” He sums up the theme of this book: “I have seen common preservation—and it works.” 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?
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.
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. This short book 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. Then, it proposes a global nonviolent insurgency for climate protection to overcome that failure. Historian and longtime activist Jeremy Brecher presents a public trust doctrine that can legitimate global climate insurgency in national and international law. He shows how to make national economies climate-safe and points the way toward justly distributing the global costs and benefits of climate protection. In addition, he lays out a new strategy to make governments and economies meet their obligations to protect the climate.
Late in 2015, nearly two hundred countries signed the Paris Agreement acknowledging their individual and collective duty to protect the earth’s climate--and willfully refused to perform that duty. They unanimously agreed to the goal of keeping global warming "well below 2 degrees Celsius” and to pursue efforts "to limit the increase in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” But they did not agree to a single legally binding requirement about how, or how much, they would cut emissions. In response to this institutional failure and to growing climate destruction, we are witnessing the birth of a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency. Global because the world order of climate destruction it seeks to change is global. Nonviolent because it relies on the power of the world’s people to withdraw their acquiescence and cooperation from those who are destroying our planet. Constitutional because it is based on the fundamental constitutional principle that the earth’s shared resources belong to the people and that governments have no authority to destroy them. Insurgency because it denies that established government authority is legitimate and asserts that its own actions are. Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual tells how to put strategy into action--and how it can succeed. It is a handbook for halting global warming and restoring our climate--a how-to for climate insurgents.
In clear, accessible language, Brecher and Costello describe how people around the world have started challenging the New World Economy. From the Zapatistas of Chiapas to students in France to the broad-based anti-NAFTA and anti-GATT coalitions in the United States, opposition to economic globalization, Brecher and Costello argue, is becoming a worldwide revolt.
A riveting documentary anthology that examines a deeply disturbing question: Is the United States guilty of war crimes in Iraq? 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. Drawing on a wide range of documents—from the protocols of the Geneva Convention to FBI e-mails about prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay to executive-branch papers justifying the circumvention of international law—In the Name of Democracy examines the legality of the Iraq war and the occupation that followed. Included in this powerful investigation are eyewitness accounts, victim testimonials, statements by soldiers turned resisters and whistle-blowers, interviews with intelligence insiders, and contributions by Mark Danner and Seymour Hersh. The result is a controversial, chilling anthology that explores the culpability of officials as well as the responsibilities of ordinary citizens, and for the first time squarely confronts the matter of American impunity.
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. Brecher traces a path that leads from the sitdown strikes on the pyramids of ancient Egypt through America’s mass strikes and labor revolts to the struggle against economic globalization to today’s battles against climate change. Weaving together personal experience, scholarly research, and historical interpretation, Jeremy Brecher shows how we can construct a “human survival movement” that could “save the humans.” He sums up the theme of this book: “I have seen common preservation—and it works.” 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?
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.
In clear, accessible language, Brecher and Costello describe how people around the world have started challenging the New World Economy. From the Zapatistas of Chiapas to students in France to the broad-based anti-NAFTA and anti-GATT coalitions in the United States, opposition to economic globalization, Brecher and Costello argue, is becoming a worldwide revolt.
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. This short book 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. Then, it proposes a global nonviolent insurgency for climate protection to overcome that failure. Historian and longtime activist Jeremy Brecher presents a public trust doctrine that can legitimate global climate insurgency in national and international law. He shows how to make national economies climate-safe and points the way toward justly distributing the global costs and benefits of climate protection. In addition, he lays out a new strategy to make governments and economies meet their obligations to protect the climate.
This book explores the moral place of the dead in our lives and in our afterlives. It argues that our lives are saturated by the past intentions and values of the dead, and that we offer the dead a form of modest immortality by fulfilling our obligations to remember them. In the first part of the book, the author examines the scope and limits of our obligations to the dead. Our obligations to respect the wishes of the dead are more substantial than commonly acknowledged, but they can be overridden in a range of cases when they conflict with the vital interests of the living, such as in organ donation and wealth inheritance. By contrast, the author contends that the obligation to remember, at least collectively, cannot be completely overridden. In the second part of the book, the author argues that tradition offers the dead a form of modest immortality—the dead live on insofar as we enact those intentional states with which they most identified. He draws on the Confucian view of ritual to argue that ritual absorption "reincarnates" the dead in the actions of the living. Finally, the author defends a Jamesian account of a pluralistic self that is consistent with the view that we have obligations to the individual dead and that the selves of the dead are pragmatic constructions. Living with the Dead will appeal to scholars and students interested in the philosophy of death, ethics, and cross-cultural philosophy.
Allied nations often stop each other from going to war. Some countries even form alliances with the specific intent of restraining another power and thereby preventing war. Furthermore, restraint often becomes an issue in existing alliances as one ally wants to start a war, launch a military intervention, or pursue some other risky military policy while the other ally balks. In Warring Friends, Jeremy Pressman draws on and critiques realist, normative, and institutionalist understandings of how alliance decisions are made. Alliance restraint often has a role to play both in the genesis of alliances and in their continuation. As this book demonstrates, an external power can apply the brakes to an incipient conflict, and even unheeded advice can aid in clarifying national goals. The power differentials between allies in these partnerships are influenced by leadership unity, deception, policy substitutes, and national security priorities. Recent controversy over the complicated relationship between the U.S. and Israeli governments—especially in regard to military and security concerns—is a reminder that the alliance has never been easy or straightforward. Pressman highlights multiple episodes during which the United States attempted to restrain Israel's military policies: Israeli nuclear proliferation during the Kennedy Administration; the 1967 Arab-Israeli War; preventing an Israeli preemptive attack in 1973; a small Israeli operation in Lebanon in 1977; the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; and Israeli action during the Gulf War of 1991. As Pressman shows, U.S. initiatives were successful only in 1973, 1977, and 1991, and tensions have flared up again recently as a result of Israeli arms sales to China. Pressman also illuminates aspects of the Anglo-American special relationship as revealed in several cases: British nonintervention in Iran in 1951; U.S. nonintervention in Indochina in 1954; U.S. commitments to Taiwan that Britain opposed, 1954-1955; and British intervention and then withdrawal during the Suez War of 1956. These historical examples go far to explain the context within which the Blair administration failed to prevent the U.S. government from pursuing war in Iraq at a time of unprecedented American power.
While the world's people suffer the apocalyptic torments of floods, fires, droughts, heatwaves, desertification, disease vectors, food shortages, forced migration, ecosystem collapse, extinction, and other effects of uncontrolled climate change, the world's governmental and political leaders continue to accelerate our wild ride to climate doom. 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. A global climate insurgency has already begun. It has the potential to halt and roll back the fossil fuel agenda and the global thrust toward climate destruction. Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual tells how to put that strategy into action—and how it can succeed. It is a handbook for halting global warming and restoring our climate—a how-to for climate insurgents.
Despite Victor Hugo's 19th-century proclamation that torture no longer exists, we still find it even now, even in those nations that claim to be paradigms of civility. Why is it that torture still exists in a world where it is routinely regarded as immoral? Is it possible to eliminate torture, and if so, how? What exactly does it mean to call something 'torture', and is it always morally reprehensible? Arguments in favour of torture abound, but in this important new book, J. Jeremy Wisnewski examines and explains the moral dimensions of this perennial practice, paying careful attention to what lessons torture can teach us about our own moral psychology. By systematically exposing the weaknesses of the dominant arguments for torture, drawing on resources in both analytic and continental philosophy and relevant empirical literature in psychology, Wisnewski aims to provide an over-arching account of torture: what it is, why it's wrong, and why even the most civilized people can nevertheless engage in it.
A rigorous and original piece of modern history is as vivid as fiction, Jeremy Bowen's Six Days not only sheds new light on one of the key conflicts of the twentieth century, it explains much about the Middle East and the problems the region still faces today. Suicide attacks on Israelis, bombings, assassinations, and bloodshed in Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank dominate the news from the Middle East. It is the most troubled region on earth. At its heart is the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis - and the legacy of six days of war in 1967. After the state of Israel emerged from war in 1948, both sides knew more battles were coming. In June 1967, years of slow-burning tension exploded. In six extraordinary days, Israel destroyed the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. But far from bringing peace, as many Israelis hoped, their stunning victory turned into a curse. From the initial battle order issued to the Israeli air force on Monday June 5, 1967 to the final ceasefire on the evening of Saturday the 10th, the Six-Day War was a riveting human drama. Building on his first-hand experience of the region after his five years as the BBC's Middle East Correspondent, as well as extensive original research, Jeremy Bowen presents a compelling new history of the conflict. Six Days recreates day by day, hour by hour, the bullying and brinckmanship that led four nations to war, interweaving testimonies of combatants from all sides in a seamless narrative.
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