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Rating: 
Summary: strategy for revolution
Review: In The Trajectory of Change, Michael Albert offers his criticisms and suggestions for the left, a movement that has yet to live up to its potential. He begins from the assumption that mass mobilization is the only way to force fundamental social change. Elites and other privileged groups don't respond to well-reasoned calls for equality, only to popular and militant demands for change -- as seen in the struggles for labor rights, civil rights, women's rights, and against the Vietnam war. Yet activists frequently forget the need to mobilize and concentrate instead on refining their own tactics, distancing themselves from the people they need to actually win change.If we accept the need to organize ever greater numbers of people with ever greater militancy, where do go then? According to Albert we first have to reach out beyond social barriers like race and class (leftist university students need to talk to people in sports bars), and then we have to give a lot of thought to the "stickiness problem". That is, why do so few people stick with left activism after being exposed to it? The two key issues Albert brings up are a lack of vision and a culture of personal criticism. If the movement can offer incisive critiques of social inequality but has no idea what institutions it wants to put in place, isn't activism literally pointless? And if interpersonal relations in the left have more to do with castigating activists who eat at McDonald's, wear Nikes, or watch TV than with making friends and partying, who would want to stay? Running through each of Albert's arguments is the idea that we have to start paying attention to class. The left is now highly sensitive to race and gender inequality, both within and without the movement. So why is class inequality ignored in society and reproduced in our organizations? Albert has his own highly original explanation for why attention to class, once the preeminent target, virtually disappeared from the left (pp. 87-103), but the ultimate point is that classlessness needs to become a priority again -- both because the left opposes oppression and because working people won't find the left attractive until it stops reproducing the hierarchical forms of organization they suffer from every day in their work lives. In all, this is a vital book for anyone working for social change. And it's short enough that even the busy activist can read it in a couple days.
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