Common Preservation

Jeremy Brecher

Description

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 toolkit for thinkers and activists - to understand and create new forms of common preservation.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 27 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629638171
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Common Preservation and Jeremy Brecher
Jeremy Brecher s work is astonishing and refreshing; and, God knows, necessary.
-Studs Terkel
Chapter by chapter, I learn from it; and I admire its ambition. When I sampled it, it engaged me so much that I set aside other work until I finished it. Overall, a fine manuscript. Rich in content. Also engaging. Is it not all or part of a philosophy or worldview?
-Charles Lindblom, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Economics at Yale University; author of The Market System
Ever since I read the draft of Common Preservation a year ago, I ve been compelled to urge a surprising variety of colleagues to read it, above all else, to understand the history, the successes, the failures, and the profound lessons to be learned from social justice movements: professional and volunteer organizers and activists, engaged citizens who yearn to be more effective. This history is systematically informed by an extraordinarily broad, cross-disciplinary reach for scholarly works that provide practical insight to the lessons to be learned. I know that I am not alone in finding much scholarly work difficult to relate to my experience as an advocate. By integrating the direct experience of the author with such work, Brecher has enabled me to do just that.
-Mike Pertschuk, former chair, Federal Trade Commission
It is an autobiography of intellectual exploration and of practical experimentation with the problems of social injustice. It is a project of the urgent transmission of the lessons learned undertaken under the duress of historical time which threatens catastrophe. It is a valedictory and an exhortation.
-Joshua Dubler, Society of Fellows, Columbia University; author of Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison
We ve been talking about turning everyday life and its challenges into a meaningful political strategy for ages. Finally Common Preservation succeeds in doing it. Engrossing.
-Ferdinando Fasce, author of An American Family: The Great War and Corporate Culture in America
Common Preservation is simultaneously a handbook for understanding the emergence of social movements and a call to action for each and every one of us to join together and address the most imminent threat to continued human existence-human-caused climate change . Longtime movement scholar, people s historian, and social activist Jeremy Brecher is just the right author at just the right time to engage with this topic. With a lifetime of participation in movements ranging from nuclear disarmament and peace to civil rights, gender equality, and labor, Brecher is well equipped to address these questions. At the heart of this book is a lifelong passion for progressive social change and a deep thirst for understanding how individuals on occasion come to realize their shared interests and coordinate their efforts to transform the world for the betterment of all . Read. Discuss. Act.
-Todd E. Vachon, from the foreword

Common Preservation: In a Time of Mutual Destruction
Jeremy Brecher
2021 PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-788-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946105
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA.
Contents
FOREWORD By Todd E. Vachon
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE An Ordinary Week in the Twenty-First Century
INTRODUCTION
PART 1 DISCOVERING THE TOOLS
CHAPTER 1 Discovering the Tools
CHAPTER 2 Freedom Road
CHAPTER 3 Metamorphosis
CHAPTER 4 What Is History?
CHAPTER 5 Re:Marx
CHAPTER 6 Expropriating Marx
CHAPTER 7 Adventures of the Dialectic
CHAPTER 8 Learning by Doing
CHAPTER 9 Feedback
CHAPTER 10 Open Systems
CHAPTER 11 The Abolition of Society
CHAPTER 12 The Power of the Powerless
CHAPTER 13 Equilibration: The Secret of Development
CHAPTER 14 Assimilation and Accommodation: The Secret of Equilibration
CHAPTER 15 How Development Works
CHAPTER 16 Equilibration and Social Movements
CHAPTER 17 Equilibration and Common Preservation
Conclusion to Part 1
PART 2 THE TOOLS
CHAPTER 18 The Tools
CHAPTER 19 Identifying Problems
CHAPTER 20 Solving Problems
CHAPTER 21 Transforming Means
CHAPTER 22 Transforming Ends
CHAPTER 23 Transforming Representation
CHAPTER 24 Transforming Boundaries
CHAPTER 25 Transforming Coordination
CHAPTER 26 Transforming Differentiation
CHAPTER 27 Transforming Power
CHAPTER 28 Countering Disorder
CHAPTER 29 Countering Domination
CHAPTER 30 Countering Disorder Combined with Domination
CHAPTER 31 Forestalling New Disorder and Domination
Conclusion to Part 2
PART 3 USING THE TOOLS: CLIMATE PROTECTION
CHAPTER 32 Climate Protection as Common Preservation
CHAPTER 33 The World Order of Climate Destruction
CHAPTER 34 Official Climate Protection from Rio to Paris
CHAPTER 35 Development of the Climate Movement: Self-Organization
CHAPTER 36 Development of the Climate Movement: Countering Power
CHAPTER 37 The Ecological Shot Heard Round the World
CHAPTER 38 The Public Trust and the Constitutional Right to a Stable Climate
CHAPTER 39 A Global Nonviolent Constitutional Insurgency
CHAPTER 40 A Climate Action Plan for Common Preservation
Conclusion to Part 3
Conclusion: The Future of Common Preservation
COMMENTARIES FOR PART 3
NOTES
INDEX
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Foreword
By Todd E. Vachon
Common Preservation is simultaneously a handbook for understanding the emergence of social movements and a call to action for each and every one of us to join together and address the most imminent threat to continued human existence-human-caused climate change. By identifying common patterns between iconic movements like the US civil rights movement and more obscure actions such as a local meat boycott by housewives in Staten Island, Brecher reminds us of how doing history -finding significant and meaningful connections-can help us act more effectively now and in the future. As your middle school social studies teacher likely told your class, If we don t know our history, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes. The message from Brecher is more urgent: if we don t learn from our actions and develop new strategies for common preservation immediately, we are doomed to end history altogether.
Common Preservation addresses these central questions:
How might we come to see that our self-interest, indeed our self-preservation, depends upon our common preservation?
How might the billions of individual humans living on the planet today coordinate our efforts and reconstruct our patterns of actions to address the threat to our mutual survival?
Longtime movement scholar, people s historian, and social activist Jeremy Brecher is just the right author at just the right time to engage with this topic. With a lifetime of participation in movements ranging from nuclear disarmament and peace to civil rights, gender equality, and labor, Brecher is well equipped to address these questions. At the heart of this book is a lifelong passion for progressive social change and a deep thirst for understanding how individuals on occasion come to realize their shared interests and coordinate their efforts to transform the world for the betterment of all. Understanding these processes is more important than ever in this current era when we are facing global pandemic, global depression, accelerating climate crisis, and heightened struggles over justice and equality.
I have seen common preservation, and I know it can work. While I was in graduate school at the University of Connecticut, my fellow graduate workers and I had been accustomed to working for low pay and simply dealing with it as best we could. It was just the way things were, and everyone knew it when they accepted the offer to come to the university. Some took on extra jobs without telling their advisors, others found they were eligible for food stamps and used them to help provide for their family. But when the university began to unilaterally cut benefits and impose further economic hardships on graduate workers, a gap arose between their expectations and the realities they faced. Just struggling along through grad school poverty was no longer working. A small group of grad workers got together and shared our stories of individual efforts to cope with the hardships. We decided to speak with more of our co-workers about their problems, which increased awareness among graduate assistants that what we had been experiencing as individual problems were in fact shared by over two thousand other graduate assistants from all different departments. It was a collective problem that required a collective solution. We ultimately formed an organization to coordinate our actions and address the problem-a union.
Common Preservation shows that there is a pattern to the emergence of such collective solutions. For example, on March 15, 2019, 1.4 million students from over two thousand cities in 125 countries on six continents made history when they walked out of school. It was the latest in a series of global student strikes urging the governments of the world to act now on climate change. These widespread mobilizations were inspired by the weekly strikes held outside of the Swedish parliament by a lone sixteen-year-old named Greta Thunberg. Like Greta, students around the world expressed fear, anger, and disappointment that adults have not acted on climate change. Addressing a crowd in Santa Fe, New Mexico, eighteen-year-old Hannah Laga Abram said:
We are living in the sixth mass extinction. Ice is melting. Forests are burning. Waters are rising. And we do not even speak of it. Why? Because admitting the facts means admitting crimes of epic proportions by living our daily lives. Because