Save the Humans?

Jeremy Brecher

Description

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?

Sujets

• Labour movement
• Urgency
• Global warming
• Social justice
• Climate change

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629638164
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Save the Humans?
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 . A medicine against apathy and political despair much needed in the US and the world today.
-Peter Marcuse, author of Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory
Over the last decades, Jeremy Brecher has known how to detect the critical issues 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-a book about people: about how our system devalues people and what needs to be done.
-Saskia Sassen, author of Territory, Authority, Rights
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.
-John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Development Redefined: How the Market Met Its Match and The Field Guide to the Global Economy
Indispensable . A fascinating blend of political autobiography and manual for social change, 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.
-Richard Falk, author of Palestine s Horizon: Toward a Just Peace and Power Shift: On the New Global Order
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.
-Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
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.
-Ferdinanda Fasce, professor of contemporary history at the University of Genoa and author of An American Family: The Great War and Corporate Culture in America
A breathtaking manuscript. I am overwhelmed and beginning to think about how I can integrate this into my teaching. An enormous contribution to the advancement of know-how for common preservation.
-Frieder Otto Wolf, professor of philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and former member of the European Parliament for the German Greens
Jeremy Brecher s work is astonishing and refreshing-and, God knows, necessary.
-Studs Terkel

Save the Humans? Common Preservation in Action
Jeremy Brecher
Jeremy Brecher 2020
This edition PM Press 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Cover design by John Yates/stealworks.com
Layout by Jonathan Rowland
ISBN: 978-1-62963-798-3
ebook ISBN: 978-1-62963-816-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946099
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface: What I Did While I Was Waiting for Doom
Prologue: March like an Egyptian
Introduction
Part 1: Discovering Social Problems
1 Discovering Social Problems
2 Kiss Your Ass Goodbye
3 This Way for the Gas
4 McCarthyism
5 Race Relations
6 Quiet Desperation
7 The Web of Life
8 The Start of a Quest
Part 2: Discovering Social Movements
9 Discovering Social Movements
10 Doctor Spock Is Worried
11 Peace How?
12 Social Roots of War
13 Solidarity-Ever?
14 Eyes on the Prize
15 SDS
16 Participatory Democracy
17 Women s Liberation
18 Nam
19 A Realm of New Possibilities
Part 3: Discovering Workers Power
20 Discovering Workers Power
21 Great Upheavals
22 If They Can Do It, Why Can t We?
23 General Strike against War?
24 Strike!
25 Sit-Down
26 Interpreting Mass Strikes
27 Class and Power: The Keys to the Workshop
28 Workers Power
29 The Work Group: A Guerrilla Band at War with Management
30 Whatever Happened to the Unions?
31 Spreading by Contagion
32 The Challenge to Authority
33 Solidarity
34 Self-Management
35 You Say You Want a Revolution?
36 Beyond Reductionism: My Critique of Strike!
37 Class and Beyond
Part 4: Discovering Globalization from Below
38 Discovering Globalization from Below
39 Constructing Wholes: The Race to the Bottom
40 The Relativity of Boundaries: Globalization
41 Constructing an Account: Patterns, Gaps, Actions, and Effects
42 Domination: The Restructuring of Global Governance
43 Disorder: Unintended Consequences
44 Differentiation and Integration: The Restructuring of Production and Labor
45 Responding to Change: A New Labor Internationalism
46 De-centering: Globalization from Below
47 Power and Dependence: The Lilliput Strategy
48 Solving Problems: Constructing Alternatives to Economic Globalization
49 Globalization and Its Crisis
Part 5: Human Preservation
50 Human Preservation
51 Mutual (but Hopefully Not Yet Assured) Destruction
52 Doom and Gloom
53 An Ecological Shift
54 Self-Organization for Common Preservation
55 A Human Preservation Movement?
56 Emergence and Convergence
57 Changing to Survive
58 The Power of the Powerless
59 Guidelines for Human Preservationists
60 A Protracted Struggle in an Era of Turmoil
Conclusion: Common Preservation
L Envoy
Notes
Index
About the Author
This book is dedicated to the memory of Tim Costello, my friend, collaborator, and writing partner of forty years.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book reflects what I ve learned from innumerable friends and colleagues over the past half century. I thank them all, especially those who have led me to question my own ideas. As William Blake said, Opposition is true friendship.
Jill Cutler has sustained me through the long travails of making this book, as well as providing me the luxury of an in-house editor. Without Michael Pertschuk s faith in it this book might never have seen the light of day. Essential support also came from Anthony Arnove, Nando Fasce, Charles Lindblom, Michael Ferber, Frances Fox Piven, and Frieder Otto Wolf. My editor Jennifer Knerr s vision was essential to the realization of this project.
My colleagues Becky Glass, Brendan Smith, and Joe Uehlein at the Labor Network for Sustainability have provided a context of thought and action that has informed the final shaping of the book.
Thanks to those who have read part or all of the manuscript at one stage or another, including Michael Ames, Michael Athay, Jill Cutler, Josh Dubler, Sharon Hammer, Charles Lindblom, Peter Marris, Brendan Smith, Dan Sofaer, Michael Pertschuk, and Frieder Otto Wolf.
Many of the ideas in this book were worked out over four decades in collaboration with the late Tim Costello.
P REFACE
WHAT I DID WHILE I WAS WAITING FOR DOOM

W HEN S AVE THE H UMANS ? WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2012, THE Doomsday Clock, which measures the world s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and other threats, was set at five minutes to midnight. In 2020, it reads 100 seconds to midnight-the closest to midnight it has ever been.
The statement explaining the setting of the Doomsday Clock for 2020 warns, Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers-nuclear war and climate change. Civilization-ending nuclear war is a genuine possibility. Climate change that could devastate the planet is undeniably happening. Institutions that should be working to address these threats have failed to rise to the challenge. 1
Save the Humans? is the story of my search for ways to counter doom by encouraging a shift from mutual destruction to common preservation. It uses history and my own experience to explore how people shift from strategies based on greed and self-aggrandizement to strategies that pursue self-interest by promoting common interests. I hope my answers to this question may contribute to halting our drive toward doom. Over the past decade, I have continued to explore those questions. This new preface updates that story.
Save the Humans? was published in the aftermath of the historic failure of the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. Meant to set humanity on the path to climate safety, instead it revealed greedy, self-aggrandizing governments and corporations unable or unwilling to protect humanity even to preserve themselves. Governments didn t approach climate change as the biggest threat we face but rather with an eye to advantages that might be gained by economic and political rivals. Fossil fuel corporations and their allies ladled out cash to persuade politicians and the public to reject policies that might threaten the profits they made from oil, coal, and gas. Copenhagen unveiled the war of all against all among domineering power centers that makes it so difficult to set back the hands of the Doomsday Clock.
Before Copenhagen, climate protection advocates worked closely with national governm