How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts (Published 2020)

Minneapolis Police were once used as strike breakers • Minnesota Reformer

The Minneapolis Police union was used to violently break up strikes, most infamously in the summer of 1934. Other unions are now cutting ties.

A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn’t.

Rising anger over widespread layoffs, disillusionment with Big Tech, and threats of mass displacement by AI have tech pros taking a good, hard look at unions.

When Riot Cops Are Not Enough

In When Riot Cops Are Not Enough, sociologist Mike King examines the policing, and broader political repression, of the Occupy Oakland movement. King’s active and daily participation in that movement provides a unique insider perspective to illustrate how the Oakland police and city administrators lost the ability to effectively control the movement.    

Their Side Is Organized; We Need to Be Organized, Too

Trump and his far-right acolytes wield their power to disinvest from public services, terrorize our neighborhoods with ICE agents, and ensure that opposition to genocide becomes a fireable, and deportable, offense. In the face of these grim and terrifying developments, it could scarcely be more urgent that we learn lessons from movements and organizing traditions that confronted repression, surveillance, and powerful opposition in the (recent and distant) past. We’ve put together a reading list of key books to help inform ongoing efforts to build and sustain durable organizations, and forge effective strategies, for both short term survival and long term social transformation. What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. “Anyone trying to rebuild an effective U.S. labor movement needs to read Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns. He lays out the fundamental principles that UE has tried to uphold for the last 85 years. For a union to be worthwhile to the working class, it needs to know which side it is on and it has to recognize that the fight itself is what allows workers to gain the knowledge and power they need.”—Carl Rosen From two co-founders of the largest tenants union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This guide, based on the collective experience of organizers and workers in non-unionized workplaces, is a critical tool to help you and your coworkers organize for justice at work.  Drawing from over twenty years of activism on local and national levels, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the intersections of immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition. At a political moment when Liberatory Harm Reduction and mutual aid are more important than ever, this book serves as an inspiration and a catalyst for radical transformation of our world. Even the River Starts Small is a collection from the movement to stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota, featuring anonymous writing, art, and photos spanning nearly a decade, and including reflections on many of the diverse experiences that made up this grassroots resistance. “Tracing revolutionary uprisings from 1989 to 2019, this book is a map of resistance and resilience in the face of tremendous odds. The case studies, as well as the introductory essay, lead us through situations where the victory of capitalism over humanity was anything but assured. And yet the book is not a wistful history about what could have been. Rather, it is a strategic assessment of near-victories to prepare us for the fire next time.” —Tithi Bhattacharya As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful. What does the politics of solidarity look like in practice, and how can left-wing organizations grow—in numbers and power—while remaining accountable to the broader movements of which they are a part? An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?” Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities—among the most vulnerable to but also least responsible for the climate crisis—have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. This volume—the Socialist Register’s first-ever reader—grapples with the question of whether political organization is a necessary part of the struggle by the working-class to overthrow capitalism. In pieces published over the course of publication’s entire history contributors, from Ralph Miliband to Jean-Paul Satre, examine various aspects of this theme. The Socialist Challenge Today presents an essential historical, theoretical, and critical perspective for understanding the potential as well as the limits of three important recent phenomena: the Sanders electoral insurgency in the United States; the Syriza experience in Greece; and Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. This book surveys revolutionary socialist ideas and engages a gallery of contentious political thinkers, offering an indispensable assessment of the place of revolutionary collectives in this radical tradition. A trenchant history of community organizing and a must-read for the next generation of organizers seeking to learn from the successes, failures, and contradictions of the past. In an era of stark racial injustice, Aaron Dixon dedicated his life to revolution, founding the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 at age nineteen. In My People Are Rising, he traces the course of his own radicalization, and that of a generation. SNCC: The New Abolitionists influenced a generation of activists struggling for civil rights and seeking to learn from the successes and failures of those who built the fantastically influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  Detroit: I Do Mind Dying tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely heralded as one the most important books on the Black liberation movement. A landmark account of a key radical feminist organization, offering lessons for today’s women’s liberation movement. Boston Female Liberation member Nancy Rosenstock expertly weaves together the reflections of her fellow-activists, describing how they became feminists, recounting the breadth of their organizing work, and linking their achievements and experience to contemporary struggles against sexism. In this rousing and insightful participant's account, Hal Draper recounts the now iconic events of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. From the impromptu speak out atop a police car after the administration decided to clamp down on students “distributing communist literature,” to the inspiring Student Strike that shut down the entire campus, Draper's narrative captures the energy and dynamism of each twist and turn in the struggle, and offers invaluable analysis along the way. From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism developed into a major influence within the trade union movement. Committed to destroying capitalism through direct industrial action and revolutionary trade union struggle, the movement raised fundamental questions for activists across the world. In this thorough, concise, and accessible introduction to Lenin’s theory and practice of revolutionary politics, Paul Le Blanc gives a vibrant sense of the historical context of the socialist movement (in Russia and abroad) from which Lenin’s ideas about revolutionary organization spring. What emerges from Le Blanc’s partisan yet measured account is an image of a collaborative, ever adaptive, and dynamically engaged network of revolutionary activists who formed the core of the Bolshevik party.

Police Abolition | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

You Deserve a Tech Union

There's a resurgent labor movement in the tech industry. Tech workers--designers, engineers, writers, and many others--have learned that when they stand together, they're poised to build a better version of the tech industry. They haven't stopped there: at companies from Kickstarter to Google, workers have formed unions. And you should, too. But what are unions? And why do they matter? Ethan Marcotte answers these questions through extensive research and by interviewing tech workers with real-world union-building experience. Ethan shares these workers' insights and stories, weaving them together to outline the process for forming a union of your very own. Because you--yes, you--deserve a tech union.

How You Start is How You Finish? The Slave Patrol and Jim Crow Origins of Policing

Though history books may say otherwise, policing in the United States has its roots in the slave patrols in the South. The institution of policing, and the larger justice system, must reconcile its past to evolve away from its racist roots.

The Reform Councillors Embedded in Britain’s Masked 'Patriot' Anti-Migrant Network

A Reform councillor and campaign co-ordinater urged his followers to join and support the masked group

It is time for a community approach to mental health

Abolitionists and mental health advocates in the US are working to replace both police and psychiatry by reimagining how we respond to mental health crisis.

We need Solidarity | deadSimpleTech

Both me and a lot of people around me have written extensively about the issues that we face in the tech industry, both inward and outward facing. Some of us have attempted to essay potential solutions, but on the whole, I don't believe we've had a coherent strategy for fighting back against this shit as an industry. So, let me propose one: we, as an industry, need to unionise quickly, effectively and on a massive scale.

How Baltimore Achieved Historically Low Homicides—With Less Police – Emerald Book

◆ Emerald Pages ◆ public safety / urban policy How Baltimore Achieved Historically Low Homicides—With Less Police Emerald Book Publication August 4, 2026 Updated: August 6, 2026 9 min read Baltimore has engineered a 68% drop in homicides since 2019, outpacing the national average—all while operating with 400 fewer officers. Here's how the city debunked

The movement to defend the Minneapolis 15

In a case with sweeping implications, supporters are fighting hard to defend the Minneapolis organizers singled out for resisting ICE.

What the latest research tells us about racial bias in policing

What we know, and importantly don't know, about the latest research on racial bias in policing.

Amid a big hiring push, police experts question ICE officer vetting

The recent fatal shootings by ICE officers in Texas and Maine come at a time when the federal agency has hired a huge number of officers quickly. Some law enforcement experts worry that this kind of a hiring spree can lead police agencies to cut corners in vetting new hires.

How the LAPD and Palantir Use Data to Justify Racist Policing

In a new book, a sociologist who spent months embedded with the LAPD details how data-driven policing techwashes bias.

How Local Cops Are Running With Trump's NSPM-7 Attacks on Antifa

Local police accused the same legal assistance group targeted by Joseph McCarthy of being part of a vast antifa conspiracy.