Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century
- 17h 46m 41s
- Tom Wetzel
- Recorded Books, Inc.
- 2022
A new, inclusive union movement with a contemporary vision and an eye toward building social and economic power can remake society.
The book is a twenty-first century reworking of the approach to unionism. The United States has a dramatic history of workers organizing on the job. In the last seventy odd years labor organizations have made peace with owners, and wages, various protections, and safety has diminished. All during an era that, despite its ups and downs, has been extremely profitable for the ownership class. Tom Wetzel provides a solution to that failure by showing how a democratic outcome can be built into the method of struggle for social change, giving working people the means to ensure they will end up in control of the labor process and will build a from-the-bottom-up eco-socialism. But this isn't the old white-guy-in-a-hard-hat unionism of the previous century. The working class has changed. Life under capitalism has changed. How we think about unionism must also change. While the political and capitalist class wring their hands over the environmental crisis and economic inequality we can see the immediate appeal of a union movement with an expanded mission to wrest control from the wealthy and powerful before they cost-shift us into extinction.
About the Author
Tom Wetzel has written on labor history, worker struggles, libertarian socialist ideas, and housing struggles since the 1970s. He has been published by ZNet and ROAR magazine and is a former editor of the anarcho-syndicalist magazine ideas & action, where many of his essays were published. He resides in Hayward, California.
In this Audiobook
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Introduction
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Chapter 1 - Freedom and Oppression
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Chapter 2 - Racial Inequality
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Chapter 3 - Working More Now but Enjoying It Less?
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Chapter 4 - You Call This a Democracy?
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Chapter 5 - Cost-shifting
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Chapter 6 - Thinking About Anti-Capitalist Strategy
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Chapter 7 - Two Forms of Prefigurative Politics
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Chapter 8 - Electoral Road to Socialism?
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Chapter 9 - The Two Souls of Unionism
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Chapter 10 - Against Leninism
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Chapter 11 - From Syndicalism to Libertarian Ecosocialism
