Overview

Today's progressives have given up on organizing and now work for professional organizations more comfortable with the inside game in Washington. Meanwhile, promising movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter cannot build enough power to accomplish meaningful change.

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9780190868659

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Reviews

For those of us grappling with the near-overwhelming difficulties of the 'how-to' of changing our workplaces, communities, and society, No Shortcuts is an invaluable resource. * Jacobin * Whether it is Black Lives Matter, climate change, feeling the Bern, or worker rights, success hinges on the ability to build real and sustainable power. Jane McAlevey gives us both a practical guide and a set of underlying principles to understand how organizing matters more than any other available strategy to grow power, and, what it means to organize. A must read for anyone hoping to create a better world. * Dan Clawson, Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst * 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 * 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 * 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 *

Author Information

"Jane F. McAlevey is a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. A longtime organizer in the environmental and labor movements, she is the author of ""Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement"" (Verso)."

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