Over the past fifteen years, people in the United States ----and dissidents in particular ----have witnessed a steady escalation of the National Security State, including invasive surveillance and infiltration, indiscriminate police violence, and unlawful arrests. Normally associated with the realities of a post-9/11 world, Crashing the Party shows how these developments were already being set in motion during the Republican National Convention (RNC) protests in 2000. It also documents how, in response, dissidents confronted new forms of political repression by pushing legal boundaries and establishing new models of collective resistance.
Crashing the Party explains how the events of 2000 acted as a testing ground in which Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney was able to develop repressive methods of policing that have been used extensively across the U.S. ever since. At the same time, these events also provided a laboratory for the radical, innovative, and confrontational forms of legal support carried out by R2K Legal, a defendant-led collective that raised unprecedented amounts of money for legal defense, used a unique form of court solidarity to overcome hundreds of serious charges, and implemented a PR campaign that turned the tide of public opinion in favor of dissidents. By analyzing the successes and failures of these tactics, Crashing the Party offers rare insight into the mechanics and concrete effects of such resistance. In this way, it is an invaluable resource for those seeking to confront today's renewed counterintelligence tactics.

----Michael Ratner, President Emeritus, Center for Constitutional Rights

In a candid and intimate new collection of essays, poems, memoirs, reviews, rants, and railleries, Marge Piercy discusses her own development as a working-class feminist, the highs and lows of TV culture, the ego-dances of a writer's life, the homeless and the housewife, Allen Ginsberg and Marilyn Monroe, feminist utopias (and why she doesn't live in one), why fiction isn't physics; and of course, fame, sex, and money, not necessarily in that order. The short essays, poems, and personal memoirs intermingle like shards of glass that shine, reflect ----and cut. Always personal yet always political, Piercy's work is drawn from a deep well of feminist and political activism.

 

Also featured is our Outspoken Interview, in which the author lays out her personal rules for living on Cape Cod, finding your poetic voice, and making friends in Cuba.

 

Humanity stands at the brink of global environmental and economic collapse. We have pinned our future to an economic system that centralizes power in fewer and fewer hands, and whose benefits increasingly flow to smaller and smaller numbers of people. Our system of government is similarly medieval ----relying on a 1780s constitutional form of government written to guarantee the exploitation of the natural environment and elevate "the endless production of more" over the rights of people, nature, and their communities.

Gabriel Kuhn's book is a thoughtful and easy to digest compilation of one-page commentaries with supporting full-color images, tracking examples of political activism within sports. Covering a period of more than 120 years, Kuhn begins with the advent of sports clubs and sports associations in Europe in the 1890s and carries it through the Civil Rights movement to today's period of mega-professional sports teams and world-wide sporting events like the World Cup and the Olympic games.

Until the Rulers Obey cannot be understood without recognizing this dialogic or dialectical context of Latin American leftism. It is as if Barack Obama, besides having once been a community organizer, had throughout his presidency been obliged to encounter grassroots organizations of varying character and strength but all intent on reminding the president what he had advocated before his election.

New types of workplace organizations are not only necessary, it is essential to look at past upsurges in union activity, particularly those of the 1930s, with clear eyes rather than romanticization, argues Staughton Lynd in Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below. A new re-issue and updating of a classic work, the book has lost none of its timeliness. Critical to understanding how unions lost their way, becoming too cozy with the corporate managements they are supposed to challenge, is the stifling of rank-and-file activity, particularly of militant tactics, by Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) unions in the 1930s.

Thousands of people gathered in New York City last month for a march calling on President Obama to release a longtime Puerto Rican independence activist from prison. Oscar L?pez Rivera was convicted in 1981 on federal charges, including seditious conspiracy ----conspiring to oppose U.S. authority over Puerto Rico by force. 2015 marks L?pez's 34th year behind bars. He is scheduled for release in 2027. We discuss L?pez's case with Congressmember Nydia Vel?zquez, Democrat for New York and the first Puerto Rican woman to be elected to Congress.