Overcoming Capitalism, Tom Wetzel
Overcoming Capitalism, Tom Wetzel
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Overcoming Capitalism
Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century

Author: Tom Wetzel

Narrator: Jonathan Yen

Unabridged: 17 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/12/2022


Synopsis

A new, inclusive union movement with a contemporary vision and an eye toward building social and economic power can remake society.

The book is a twenty-first century reworking of the approach to unionism. The United States has a dramatic history of workers organizing on the job. In the last seventy odd years labor organizations have made peace with owners, and wages, various protections, and safety has diminished. All during an era that, despite its ups and downs, has been extremely profitable for the ownership class. Tom Wetzel provides a solution to that failure by showing how a democratic outcome can be built into the method of struggle for social change, giving working people the means to ensure they will end up in control of the labor process and will build a from-the-bottom-up eco-socialism. But this isn't the old white-guy-in-a-hard-hat unionism of the previous century. The working class has changed. Life under capitalism has changed. How we think about unionism must also change. While the political and capitalist class wring their hands over the environmental crisis and economic inequality we can see the immediate appeal of a union movement with an expanded mission to wrest control from the wealthy and powerful before they cost-shift us into extinction.

About Tom Wetzel

Tom Wetzel has written on labor history, worker struggles, libertarian socialist ideas, and housing struggles since the 1970s. He has been published by ZNet and ROAR magazine and is a former editor of the anarcho-syndicalist magazine ideas & action, where many of his essays were published. He resides in Hayward, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Corvus

Overcoming Capitalism is a book that offers information about working class struggle without expecting the reader to come away from it with a bunch of theory without any praxis. I don't have any issue with theory alone, but it can often leave the reader thinking, "ok, I agree with you totally/partly......more

Goodreads review by Ryan

Overcoming Capitalism provided me with the most comprehensive understanding of Syndicalism of anything I've read on the topic, which admittedly hasn't been much. It almost made me want to get a job or move to a city so I could help organize a union. Almost. I often get frustrated at books that descr......more

Very interesting book about how to counteract the destructive forces of capitalism by forming worker-led unions. I gave it 3/5 stars because it could be 3/5 as long as it is.......more

Goodreads review by AB

As a primer for understanding our current capitalist system through the eyes of an informed socialist perspective, this book is powerfully understated and erudite. Symptoms of inequality and historical attempts at socialist endeavours are well-represented and researched. Indeed, the reader comes awa......more

I will first say that I agree with the key arguments Wetzel makes in this book. An overview of how a radically democratic socialist society might be organised is necessary and timely. It is generally well-researched and does a good job of situating Wetzel’s socialism amongst alternative forms of soc......more