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An interview with Barbara Ehrenreich by South End Press on “Being Left”: …”you don’t know what you are doing all the time, you don’t know what kind of effect your actions are having, but you know that if you keep flipping marbles at a big crowd of marbles, eventually, bit by bit, they all might start moving.”

YOU MAY not have noticed, but 50,000 U.S. coal miners were on strike for four months this spring and summer 1989. The 10-state strike featured the unprecedented mass application of nonviolent civil disobedience to a labor struggle: Thousands of miners and family members have been arrested for peacefully blocking mine entrances. Troops have been called Read more…

This is the second essay in our series on political vision. Those wanting to know more about the economic vision discussed here, should go to our website www.zmag.org, which lists articles and books on participatory economicsEds. EHRENREICH: I have heard that theres been a lot of interest around the world in your book, Parecon: Life Read more…

Perhaps the best kept political secret of our time is that politics, as a democratic undertaking, can be not only “fun,” in the entertaining sense, but profoundly uplifting, even ecstatic. My generation had a glimpse of this in May 1968 and at other points in that decade, when strangers embraced in the streets and Read more…

Ehrenreich It’s a conundrum that routinely paralyzes the left: The news brings us the horrors of postmodern warfare–concentration camps in Bosnia, mass slaughter in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands homeless in Zaire. On the one hand, we want to do something. On the other hand, as thinking people possessed of some historical memory, we have Read more…