Part II of Jane McAlevey’s excellent talk at the launch of her new book ‘No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age’.
A video of part I is available here and audio is available here.
“McAlevey’s decades as a labor and community organizer means that she knows what organizers do, or should do. This book lifts the lessons McAlevey takes from that craft into the intellectual realm of power and politics. This book is for anyone who wants a democratic society in which ordinary people share power.” — Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America
“Jane McAlevey is a deeply experienced, uncommonly reflective organizer. In No Shortcuts, McAlevey stresses the distinction between mobilizing and organizing and examines how systematic conflation of the two has reflected and reinforced the labor movement’s decline over recent decades. More than a how-to manual for organizers, No Shortcuts is a serious, grounded rumination on building working-class power. It is a must read for everyone concerned with social justice in the US.” — Adolph Reed, Jr., Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
“Jane McAlevey is one of the few analysts of social movements today who takes class power and class struggle seriously. McAlevey understands their ineluctable concreteness and force from years of organizing democratic unions that have effectively battled powerful corporations. This is a book for citizens and activists – but also for students and scholars of social movements – who want to understand how the world can and has been changed for the better.” — Jeff Goodwin, Professor of Sociology, New York University