Prerelease
Reader Reactions
"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!"
Brian Kelly, Organizer
Pace University & NYC, SDS
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"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.
Cynthia Peters
Boston Organizer/writer
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"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."
Justin Podur
Toronto journalist and activist
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"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."
Chris Spannos
Editor of AK Press’s forthcoming Parecon and the Good Society and Hope, Reason, and Revolution
ZNet Staff Member
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"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."
Brian Dominick
Syracuse activist and The Newstandard
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“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.”-
Andrej Grubacic
anarchist
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And from the cover:
"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."
–Noam Chomsky
Boston Writer
"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."
–Barbara Ehrenreich
New York Writer
"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."
–Howard Zinn
Boston Historian
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