The Year Left Volume 3, Reshaping the US Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s: v. 3 (Haymarket) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0860919099 ISBN 13: 9780860919094

Publisher: Verso Books, 1988

Synopsis

This is the first chronicle of the other side of the Reagan era: the surprising renaissance of the popular left across the United States. Challenging political conservatism and possessive individualism, a vigorous spectrum of community-based oppositions and insurgent subcultures has flourished.

This book puts the different experiences together in a common perspective. Participants recount the history of the radical struggles of our time: the Central America solidarity campaigns, the Sanctuary movement, the 'Freeze', the women's peace movement, the new eco-socialism, and more. Union activists analyze a trio of seminal community-supported labor struggles - P-9, Watsonville and GM Van Nuys - that have shown ways to resist concessions and plant closure. There is a fascinating comparison with the experience of Canadian labor against the New Right: Solidarity in British Columbia. A final section reconsiders the language of class in American history and offers fresh perspectives on racism and the representation of white working-class experience.

Together with previous volumes of The Year Left on socialists and the Democratic Party (volume 1) and the Rainbow Coalition and popular cultures of color (volume 2), this is intended to be a fundamental contribution to discussion of the future of the American left.

About this title

About the Authors

Michael Sprinker was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the History of Historical Materialism and History and Ideology in Proust are also published by Verso. Together with Mike Davis, he founded Verso's Haymarket Series and guided it until his death in 1999.

Mike Davis (1946-2022) was a writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian. He is best known for his investigations of power and class in works such as City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0860919099
• ISBN 13: 9780860919094
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 316
• Editor: Sprinker Michael, Davis Mike