FEBRUARY2007

books:

Remembering Tomorrow: From SDS to Life After Capitalism.
By Michael Albert
 :
 
"In this candid memoir of the American Left, veteran anticapitalist activist Michael Albert offers a characteristically unadorned personal account of recent American movements to transcend inequality. A uniquely visionary figure, Remembering Tomorrow recounts a life of uncompromising commitment, whether chronicling the battles against the Vietnam War and his own political awakening as a member of SDS or recounting the challenges of creating alternative social models, Albert strikes a balance between resistance and vision. Reflections on the life of a child of the sixties and would be physicist cum radical economist, Albert's story is a lesson in the profound hope that inspires social change."
 
The book includes, in its 450 pages and 34 chapters, the history of ZNet, Z, South End Press, Parecon, and much of the left from SDS to the WSF over the past forty years, including matters of belief, motives, values, organization and structure, funding, policy, people, and interpersonal relations. 
 
The book page for Remembering Tomorrow is at http://www.zmag.org/remtom.html and includes the cover, table of contents, introduction, various comments, links for purchase, etc. We hope you will visit it!
 
Below we relay some comments by early readers and below that, Albert's author interview about the book.
 
 
Early Comments on Remembering Tomorrow...

 
About the book, Noam Chomsky writes on the jacket:
 
"Michael Albert's accomplishments in his life and work have been truly remarkable.... This lively memoir not only adds new dimensions to understanding his own perspective and ideas, but also provides revealing and often surprising insights into the exciting history of the past forty years, the popular movements and the institutional structures that have sought to contain and undermine them, their successes and failures, and the prospects for moving on. It is quite an achievement."

 
Barbara Ehrereich also writes on the jacket:
 
"Remembering Tomorrow is the deeply engaging story of Michael Albert's evolution from frat boy to one of the world's premiere utopian thinkers--not just a tale of the sixties, it'll be just as relevant in the late 21st century."

 
And Howard Zinn, writes, also on the jacket:
 
"Michael Albert is an important thinker who takes us beyond radical denunciations and pretentious analysis to a thoughtful, profound meditation on what a good society can be like."


 
The book is just out, this being the first public notice, and there haven't been many readers yet, obviously - though a few people had pre publication copies and we do have a few comments they have offered for display.

 
Brian Kelly, a prominent SDS organizer at Pace University and in NYC wrote:
 
"Remembering Tomorrow provides an incredible array of practical lessons from the past that we can apply directly to our lives in the present and future. Its look at the sixties and decades since, addressing culture, political events, and especially activist organizing, presents history not only honestly, but as we need it. Its focus on vision and strategy challenges our current over emphasis on only critique. Its exploration of what type of society we really want by way of historical examples and experiences is mind altering. Weaving together issues of sex, gender, race, and class, of what has been and of what could be, of people and their lives, places and their conflicts, and events and their implications, all culled from personal experiences, makes for a wonderfully human book that is also inspiring and edifying. Remembering Tomorrow is a must read for every young organizer who is serious about struggling to win. I have read it twice and am going back for a third time!"

 
Cynthia Peters, Boston Organizer and writer and past staff person at South End Press wrote:
 
"Sometimes poetic, sometimes analytical, always provocative, tenacious, and hopeful, Michael Albert brings his unique understanding of the past and his fearless vision of the future together in this remarkable memoir. These are not just the reminiscences of a 60s radical, this is the story of someone for whom the lessons of the time took root and grew into a lifelong commitment to create alternative institututions that address the pain of the oppressive systems that hurt us all. That pain is never far from the surface in Remembering Tomorrow. (Expect to cry while you read.) But nor is the hopefulness that a radically better world is possible. (You can expect to feel that as well.) It is a rare honor and pleasure to get to know this organizer, thinker, economist, media activist, and true visionary through his deeply felt reflections on war, patriarchy, classism, and racism -- all emerging through the lens of someone who has spent the last 40 years on the front lines of social change work. Read Remembering Tomorrow. You won't emerge unscathed. But you will emerge with a new sense of the possible and with a set of insights and lessons that should help us all deal with current realities while pointing ourselves toward a better future."

 
Brian Dominick, Syracuse activist and collective member at The Newstandard, wrote:
 
"What is most significant to me about Michael Albert's memoir is not its insight into how he formed his radical worldview, but its insight into how he has maintained, expanded and applied it in the decades since. Becoming a radical, as Michael insists was true for him and certainly was for me, is no major feat. More often than not, it just happens, for many people requiring no extra effort. But resisting social pressures to surrender one's radicalism -- not just during a life phase but over a lifetime -- is another matter entirely. For younger people with decades to go in the development of our beliefs and the application of our own radical principles, this book is a series of countless lessons in how not to be overcome with despair, how not to sell out and how to be most effective in applying one's energies while carving out a workable and fulfilling life. But Remembering Tomorrow isn't a series of lectures, and it's anything but a compilation of crotchety observations by a tired dinosaur of the Sixties. It's a captivating read that even an old friend of Michael's will find filled with surprising thoughts, encounters and tangents about everything from organizing and violence to money and personal relations, about people, places, and yes, even things. If you want or need hope about building movements and institutions capable of truly revolutionary social change, this is the book for you."

 
Justin Podur, a Toronto journalist and activist, who volunteers with ZNet, as well, wrote:
 
"The institutions we live in, Michael Albert teaches, prevent us from thinking clearly about what is important. They also prevent us from connecting with each other. In such a world, our visions of a better future can become convoluted and disconnected. Michael Albert's life's work has been to present a case for a vision of a better future that is clear, lucid, and not convoluted. By giving us the human story out of which that case emerged, he helps us to connect it - with a history and trajectory of struggle, with the movement that taught him so much, and with the tradition of ideas that informs his insights into economic vision and political strategy. I read Remembering Tomorrow for this, for the stories, and to learn more about ideas and people that influenced me."

 
Chris Spannos, Editor of AK Press's forthcoming Parecon and the Good Society and Hope, Reason, and Revolution, and a ZNet Staff Member wrote:
 
"How do we envision, create, strategize and seize libratory institutions for libratory outcomes -- ultimately on a societal scale? Sadly, currently social movements often reinvent the wheel, sometimes not even as well as those who have come before. We too often overlook lessons of the past. Remembering Tomorrow provides diverse lessons extrapolated from a breadth of intense movement experiences combined with a rigorous effort at theorizing vision and strategy -- in all realms of life. For me, the lynch pin of Albert's memoir was his decision to become a full time revolutionary, and not a professional physicist, mathematician, academic economist, professor, social worker, or a co-opted chemical company hack; all of which would probably have been easier for him, but a great loss for our Left movements. Albert has been instrumental in creating South End Press, Z Magazine, and ZNet, and in developing the Participatory Economic vision. Remembering Tomorrow uses the memoir approach to navigate from 1960 through 2005. Humorous, moving, revealing, Remembering Tomorrow is a vehicle conveying empowerment, insight, and inspiration. Remembering Tomorrow is eloquent, audacious, pugnacious and necessary. We owe it to ourselves and to our social movements to learn from it and carry its lessons forward."

 
Andrej Grubacic, anarchist historian wrote:
 
"This gripping memoir is Michael Albert's gift to the revolutionaries of my own generation. His writing emerges from his life, one of consistent visionary activism. A delightful, amusing, shrewd and very perceptive look at American radicalism, "Remembering Tomorrow" is the first historical perspective on the New Left of the 60's and the New Left of the contemporary global social movements - and the links between them. A pleasure to read, "Remembering Tomorrow" is the book from which much can be learned."-
 
Again, the book page link for Remembering Tomorrow is http://www.zmag.org/remtom.html
 
Please visit.
 

 
The ZNet author interview with Albert, about Remembering Tomorrow...
Remembering Tomorrow
ZNet Book Interview
Michael Albert
 
(1) Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, Remembering Tomorrow, is about? What is it trying to communicate?
 
Remembering Tomorrow is not organized in a linear historical flow, as are most memoirs. Instead, Remembering Tomorrow's main sections and chapters feature broad types of content such as the Sixties, activist organizing since the Sixties, teaching and learning experiences, building new media and activist institutions, international experiences, money and the left, portraits of people I've met and worked with, music and culture and the left, personal life and the left, and the ups and downs of creating and advocating vision and strategy.
 
In the large, Remembering Tomorrow tries to communicate the intimate characteristics of dissent, resistance, and building new and better social relations. It explores what happens in such projects, who is involved, people's choices and beliefs, and our institutions and movements. Remembering Tomorrow personally presents left logic, motives, and feelings. Why did we act as we did - both in the Sixties, and in the decades since? What do we feel about what we have done and how we have done it? How do others react? It isn't religious, but there is plenty of revelation.
 
Remembering Tomorrow highlights organizing and features consciousness raising. It focuses on activism and demonstrations, on institution building, writing, and speaking, but also on academia and teaching, book and magazine publishing, internet and media activism, and developing and evaluating ideas for movement building.
 
Organizations from SDS to the WSF and many in between are prominent. Many individuals pass through the pages, some notable and others not, some effective and others not. Finances and fund raising make a substantial appearance, as does left culture and community. Large scale moral, emotional, social, and intellectual failings and successes are explored. And Remembering Tomorrow is also about personal daily life choices including friendships and hostilities, the logic and impact of people's sexual and career choices, and of movement interpersonal relations. Remembering Tomorrow is about worries and it is about hopes.
 

(2) Can you tell ZNet something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is?
 
I have been author, co-author, or editor of nearly twenty books, and publisher of over a hundred, but this was the hardest to complete. Partly I was intimidated by the material. I felt like I couldn't convey the reality and lessons of the Sixties unless the prose matched the topic, and trying to attain that was very difficult. Dauntingly, once I got going, the same held for most other parts of the book as well, for example the history of South End Press or Z, or describing the process of the development of the participatory economic vision. In these cases too, not to mention personal experiences, I wanted to convey the actual feelings and thoughts that arose along the way, not just the final results.The phrasing and nuance of the writing, and not just its substance, had to fit the people, ideas, events, and actions of the times. The tone had to excite readers and also communicate both the texture and content of the events explored. In short, not just the book's literary logic, but also its styleistic pacing had to both communicate and interrogate the ideas relayed. I was intimidated by that stylistic need, especially regarding the older period called the Sixties. It was also hard  to remember content from times past, and to reject lots of stories that mattered to me but didn't present material of more general value. You write a book like this and for the duration you are dredging up and assessing decades of not always pleasant events. That made this project much harder than writing a more analytic work.
 
Books on how to write memoirs tell prospective authors that you must communicate as a novel does, with texture and detail. They say, if you don't remember who wore what at the event you are describing, the weather on the day of the event, who said what to whom at the event, and so on, well then you should just make it up. This may sound incredible to you - it certainly did to me - but that is the advice memoirists receive, and it's what memoirists typically do, too. Books with advice about writing memoirs also say, don't show a memoir to anyone until after its publication. They say, put in your memoir everything that is dramatic, leave out anything that isn't, or, better, tweak it until it is. In other words, books about writing memoirs have lots of crummy, commercial, self serving, and anti-social advice which memoirists generally live by. I naturally ignored all that advice. I checked Remembering Tomorrow's stories with those involved. I didn't make up anything. I included what I thought had meaning and might resonate usefully. I left out what didn't, however dramatic it may have been. But, yes, I also tried to write Remembering Tommorrow congenially, emotively, personally, and of course accessibly. The book's content comes from the period addressed, nearly half a century. What went into making Remembering Tomorrow was that history, and everyone involved in it, and a lot of heartfelt writing and editing that utilized help from many readers - as is the case with most books.
 

(3) What are your hopes for Remembering Tomorrow? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort?
 
Everything I write and do politically has one overarching purpose, to contribute to efforts to revolutionize society and history. So if the book contributes to movement growth and to successful struggle I am happy about it. If it doesn't contribute, then I am sad about it.
 
I tried to make the accounts in Remembering Tomorrow instructive about what is wrong with society, what we might prefer as vision, and how we might attain our aims, but I also tried to make the book's stories about people, places, institutions, and acts not only true and accurate, but also engaging, inspiring, tear-jerking, provocative, instructive, and revealing. I hope the book accomplishes all that sufficiently to make a difference in how readers think about themselves, about their actions and choices, and about their aims and methods.
 
More specifically, Remembering Tomorrow has three broad audiences who I am most trying to address. First, there are people of my generation who were once and who may or may not still be involved with social change. I hope Remembering Tomorrow reawakens or otherwise strengthens their commitment for justice and their willingness to act insightfully on it. There are, after all, millions of us. Then there are young people in high schools, colleges, and at work, who have recently become politically active, including in the new SDS, for example. I hope Remembering Tomorrow provides its young readers a useful look at past experiences of the Sixties and of the decades since. I hope Remembering Tomorrow helps them navigate the tricky and crucial life choices they face, helping in particular with the tasks of personal development, consciousness raising, mapping their futures, and organizing. And then, finally, there are people who who have been heretofore uninvolved in the left but who are curious about leftists and about left history,and who wonder who leftists are, what we are about, what we do, what we feel and think, and the whys and wherefores of it all. I hope Remembering Tomorrow can give them some answers that will simultaneously inspire and provoke them, perhaps affecting their choices in coming years.
 
Judging one's work, whether writing, or organizing, or even just living, is awfully hard. For example, you travel a long way and give a talk, one time, and there are ten people there, who listen quietly, ask few questions, and leave. Another time, you travel similarly and there are a thousand people who react with great gusto, ask many questions, and seem quite excited. It is tempting, almost unavoidable, to feel that the first effort was a relative failure and the second a big success. But what if one of those ten people had a life altering experience and became the modern day equivalent of Rosa Parks? And what it, on the other hand, the thousand people, much as they enjoyed your talk and applauded until their hands were raw, weren't altered by it at all? They just heard something they liked, which, however, added nothing to their lives. Now which talk was the success?
 
I think it is like that with a book too. Do I want more readers than less? Yes, of course, I do. Do I hope for wide discussion and debate about the book's contents? Naturally I do. Do I hope that this book will inspire many people to additionally pick up more detailed works on parecon? Yes, for sure. But is all that essential for Remembering Tomorrow to prove itself worth the time expended on it? No, probably not, but as to what would be decisive in that regard, honestly, I wish I knew. Regarding self assessment, I generally hope for the best and just keep plugging. I imagine that will be my reaction to whatever success or lack of success this book has in the months ahead, too.




First Person: Amazon Customer Petition Wins Fairer Treatment for Carter Book

By Henry Norr

http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=01-26-07&storyID=26187

Ten days after I began a campaign to protest Amazon’s hostile presentation of former President Jimmy Carter’s book on Palestine, and a day after the petition with more than 16,000 signatures was delivered to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the company responded by revamping the page in a way that puts the book in a completely different light. The petition complained that Amazon had abandoned its usual evenhandedness by posting the full text of a lengthy attack on Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in its "Editorial Reviews" section—and by repeatedly refusing customer requests that it add a more positive review in the same location for balance.

In signing the petition, customers pledged to stop shopping at Amazon if the retailer did not come up with a more balanced page by Jan. 22. A copy of the petition, some 16,200 signatures, and supporting materials were sent to Bezos and his staff on Friday. The following morning, the "Editorial Reviews" section of the page listing Carter’s book was overhauled: It now begins with a glowing tribute from Amazon to the former president’s achievements and an interview with him about the book, plus a photo of him and graphic links to some of his other books—all new material, and all of it posted ahead of the negative review.

This is a huge victory. The whole tone of the page is different now. Instead of saying, in effect, "Stay away from this vile book," what it now conveys is the truth: that this is an important and fair-minded,
even if controversial, book by a distinguished American who has unique qualifications to address the issue of Palestine.

Paul Larudee, an El Cerrito piano technician who helped me organize the protest campaign, said, "Of course Amazon deserves credit for responding after initially refusing to make a change. However, the real credit goes to the thousands of petition signers who exercised their power—in this case the nonviolent power to take their business elsewhere. It gives hope that boycotts and other nonviolent efforts can help to end the larger injustices that Carter addresses in his book."

I’m sorry Amazon continues to display the review by Jeffrey Goldberg because I think it’s horribly unfair and misleading, and I still wish they would add one of the other reviews we suggested. Some people who signed the petition have let me know that they still intend to close their accounts if Amazon doesn’t make more changes, and I understand their feelings. But what the petition was really demanding was fair and balanced treatment for the book, and on the whole I think we’ve come
pretty close to that objective. From: Virginia Raines <rainesco@inbox.com>

The Metaphysics of Capital
Nicholas Ruiz III

ISBN: 097899020X

 Release date: intertheory press, November 1, 2006

available at amazon,
barnes and noble, etc.

 Product Description

"A history of Capital, like a history of religion, reflects little more than the current fashion in historical time. A metaphysics of Capital, derived from the preponderance of a capitalizing bare life, supports the idea that Capital has no birth, but is eternally complicit with life, the only variance being, the way in which we define Capital. Capital, that is, the coining of the term--is not synonymous with its inception, or more saliently, there is no immaculate conception of Capital. Like the genetic Code, our identification of it did not make it so; make it exist, as it were. Evidently, unlike God, the Code preceded our conception of it. Ironically, like God, the Code must capitalize upon an environment in order to survive. In other words, Capital is a currency of the Code"

 About the Author

Nicholas Ruiz III was born in New York City. He teaches bioethics, ethics and critical thought in the department of Humanities at Kaplan University. He is also the editor of Kritikos, http://intertheory.org