Books like We Want Everything

How could a bunch of creative, courageous, but also somewhat crazy activists make the authoritarian regime of Poland under communist rule tremble? By bringing a moment of joy and laughter to an otherwise dull and grey world. That is what the Polish Orange Alternative Movement did during the late 1980s.

Lives of the Orange Men tells the story of the group. It’s a book that simply made me laugh a lot. Written as a series of captivating autobiographies—and not every word is to be taken seriously!—it is full of anecdotes of activists playfully mocking authorities. “What are those pills,” police once wondered after searching the backpack of an arrested activist. “Happy pills,” the man replied. One officer was eager to try them; happy pills just sounded too good. They turned out to be mints.

A lot has been written about the famous May ’68 in France, but to me, Kristin Ross’s book stands out because of what she argues was at the heart of the protests: they were an experiment “in declassification, in disrupting the natural ‘givenness of places,’” an attempt to question the very order of society.

Students left their spaces of study to engage with workers; workers—or at least some of them—refused to return to the hell their workplace was: they didn’t want to function as students or workers anymore. This vision of transgressing social or spatial boundaries, I believe, still speaks to the present. It promises a life not determined by social roles, a society not divided by neat sociological categories.

What fascinates me about the history of protesting isn’t only that ordinary people campaigned for or against political change but also that they started experimenting with different ways of living. This is why Sasha Roseneil’s book made me dream and smile: a deeply human and intimate book based on oral history interviews, telling the story of the women’s protest camp at the Greenham Common Airforce base in England, where American Cruise Missiles equipped with nuclear warheads were stationed.

The women of Greenham Common, as Roseneil’s book wonderfully shows, did more than protest the dangers of nuclear war. In the cold and dirt of the camp, amidst the fear of nuclear annihilation, they built a community of laughter, dancing, hugging, and caring: a “queer space,” as Roseneil puts it, of trying out alternatives to the Cold War world of bureaucracy and rationality.

I hardly imagined the Soviet Union, a place of grey and black, with the only sparks of color being red, to be a place for hippie culture to flourish. Juliane Fürst’s book taught me otherwise. It leads into a world of people like Azazello and Ofelia, who look like “angels, creatures from another world, blots of color on a grey canvas, flowers in a concrete desert.”

The book traces how these hippies, against all odds, found ways to distance themselves from the Soviet System, not through open opposition but through dreaming of and living a different life, communally, spiritually, and often on the road. And Fürst’s book does more than merely portray Soviet hippies in a fundamentally sympathetic way: It also reveals what we can learn about a larger society by studying those at the margins. It is an unusual but highly illuminating perspective on the late Soviet Union.

I have long been a fan of stories about courageous women and I love it when I discover a book for young readers that brings to life an inspiring story of someone they may not know well (or at all). That’s exactly what Warren does in this book about Delores Huerta. The text works well for even the youngest readers. It promotes empathy by describing the poor living conditions of migrant children and their parents. Its themes are as relevant today as they were in Delores’ time. We need to care, we need to stand up for others, we need to be fair. It’s beautifully illustrated, too.

Dalton was a wonderful poet and radical activist tragically executed by his Salvadorean comrades in 1975 when they erroneously believed him to be working for the CIA. The Salvadorean left has a poor record in devouring its own in bouts of paranoia that attended the civil war of the 1980s. Marmol, who survived deep into old age, was a ringleader of an uprising in 1932 that briefly promised a peasant overthrow of a state controlled by an oligarchy of a dozen families. The uprising was repressed with such force that the military was able to retain political power for the next four decades. This book is beautifully written and translated wonderfully well by Richard Schaaf and Kathleen Ross.

This is not only a great ethnography (a book based on long-term anthropological fieldwork) giving a splendidly detailed and deeply humane account of the lives of Bolivian tin miners and their families in the 1970s, but also one of the most effective case studies within the framework of “dependency theory.”

The title, which comes from one of the author’s interviews with a miner, captures the violence and misery of tin mining, but I also love the way the book portrays its protagonists as ordinary people living and giving meaning to their lives as best they can. 

The literature on Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and their boycott campaigns is quite extensive. Matt Garcia’s is one of the best accounts of the Farm Workers’ strategy of boycotting grapes, lettuce, and other items to build power and win a union. What I especially appreciate about Garcia’s account is, first, his focus on the innovations in consumer activism brought about by the UFW. Organizers and workers made their boycott succeed by going into cities, living together in boycott houses, and appealing to urban consumers. Garcia’s accounts of boycott houses and organizers’ efforts from Los Angeles to Toronto and London are excellent. Second, Garcia doesn’t stray from critiquing the boycott tactic and noting places where it fell short – making this a cautionary tale for activists today.

Steven Greenhouse, who spent decades as The New York Times' labor reporter, writes as good a survey of the state of the present-day labor movement as you can find anywhere.

Uber drivers, health care workers, auto workers, and more, this is a book for anyone who wonders where union power stands, how it’s gotten here, and who the players are who are trying to revive unions for a new century.

Domestic workers, among the most exploited of the world’s working classes, knew they deserved more and believed the work they did – caring for the children, the disabled, the elderly – should be honored.

They organized first in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Soon the movement spread across the world. Jennifer Fish travels with the movement, from Cape Town to Geneva, Montevideo, and beyond. Like the women she befriends, Fish believes in the power of community and of what can be achieved when workers imagine the world they want and start moving together toward it.

There’s no better book about international worker solidarity and the power of thinking and acting both local and global.