Save the Humans?
Common Preservation in Action
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A longtime left-wing activist reflects on the struggle to save the world in this earnest but muddled memoir-cum-manifesto. Brecher (Strike!) recaps his experiences in the antinuclear, civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements of the 1950s through the 1970s, and his ongoing work in the labor movement. This sketchy retrospective serves as grist for an analysis of the sociology of protest movements and their prospects for tackling current dilemmas. Drawing on the history of mass wildcat strikes for models of popular revolt and self-direction, he calls for an ethos of unity and "common preservation" against the ills that beset mankind, one in which disparate movements against climate change, multinational corporations, nuclear weapons, you name it coalesce into a "global people's movement to eliminate threats to human survival." Brecher combines many strands of lefty rhetoric, from high-minded internationalism to sloganeering he exhorts readers to both "act up" and "keep eyes on the prize" and turgid wonkery about society's "multiple interacting levels of systems and subsystems." Unfortunately, no coherent program emerges from all of this beyond vague gestures toward "interconnected changes in the organization of social power." Brecher's grandiose but feckless progressive vision has plenty of movement but no real action.
