From a Speech by Grace Lee Boggs

I’m a very old woman. I was born in 1915 in what was later known as the First World War, two years before the Russian Revolution. And because I was born to Chinese immigrant parents and because I was born female—I learned very quickly that the world needed changing.

But what I also learned as I grew older was that how we change the world and how we think about changing the world has to change.

The time has come for us to reimagine everything. We have to reimagine work and go away from labor. We have to reimagine revolution and get beyond protest. We have to think not only about change in our institutions, but changes in ourselves. We are at the stage where the people in charge of the government and industry are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It’s up to us to reimagine the alternatives and not just protest against them and expect them to do better.

By B. Jesse Clarke

To have any hope of solving the twin crises of accelerating environmental degradation and growing economic inequality, we have to reimagine some fundamental assumptions in both the domestic and economic spheres: What is work? What is leisure? What is labor performed in our homes? How, as a society, do we organize our domestic and work lives so that we can meet our fundamental material and cultural needs?

Cooperative work places have long experience in organizing democratic governance for the means of production, but we need to move beyond industrial-era understandings of social relations. Democratizing the means of reproduction—the social sphere in which we meet the needs for education, health care, and domestic work—is an urgent task that can make another world possible.

By Diana Pei Wu

In September 30, California took a big step toward giving all residents access to clean energy and green jobs when Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 535 and AB 1532 into law. The new laws—which are the result of a four-year campaign by a broad-based coalition—will invest hundreds of millions of dollars towards greening underserved areas and in the process, support small businesses and bring clean energy jobs to disadvantaged communities each year.

By Darwin Bond Graham

In 1997, the city of Oakland, California entered into an interest rate swap agreement with Goldman Sachs. The bank promised that the swap would provide savings and allow Oakland to better fund crucial services. But the swap became a toxic liability in 2008 when Wall Street’s greed crashed the economy and neither the bank nor the federal government helped the city unwind the deal.