The history of people living and working in the global capitalist system since the fourteenth century can be divided into distinct periods or eras. These periods are defined in part by the broad strategy used by the system as a whole to accumulate a social surplus that is used to keep the system going. They are also defined by the social struggles of ordinary people who find the specific rules that define this strategy to be contradictory to their own development as human beings. Historically, each period has ended in crisis and has ushered in a new strategy for the...

Philosophy is the method through which we comprehend the world around us. It is also a basis for action. Often the philosophic premises of both thought and action lie beneath the surface and go unexamined. This is a mistake. There are many different philosophic premises that underlie how we try to understand and comprehend the world we live in and how we act on this understanding. And many of these premises are in conflict. The purpose of this chapter is to establish the philosophic ground that will become the method of this book.

That ground can be illuminated through a...

The history of global capitalism is marked by a number of distinct eras or periods that are defined by the way the system as a whole accumulates surplus value. Shifts from one era to another have been occasioned by crisis. The specific nature of each crisis is beyond the scope of this book, but the topic has been the subject of much debate.¹ The mechanisms for accumulation include a variety of institutions and a political and ideological apparatus to support them. The currently popular term “globalization” is more accurately a distinct approach to accumulation that describes the present period. I...

There can be no doubt that part of the income and wealth polarization of the present period is rooted in the collapse of unionized manufacturing jobs in the United States during the 1980s. In Chapter 3, I attributed that collapse to the systemic strategy, which former President Bush called a new world order. But others have offered conflicting explanations. The mainstream view concerning deindustrialization is that it represents a natural and positive adjustment to a post-industrial or information age economy and new competitive conditions. Manufacturing job loss is potentially positive, in this view, because it can result in greater efficiency....

One response to deindustrialization and the destruction of jobs and communities in Chicago was to call upon local government to defend Chicago’s workers and communities. The workplaces, which had been the center of efforts to improve the lives of those who toiled there, could no longer serve this function. They were rapidly being dismantled. Similarly, community-based organizing was faltering because of the lack of jobs and incomes of neighborhood residents. Third, the attack on the living standards of Chicago’s workers was exacerbating racial tensions. As an era of highly mobile capital gained steam, competition among workers was heightened. Under these...

Shortages of affordable housing are nothing new. But the nature of the housing problem (and hence potential solutions) takes different forms in different eras. The previous chapter touched on this. The first Mayor Daley implemented housing policy in the Fordist era. The post–World War II deal with U.S. labor, which was a key aspect of that era, included housing. Simply stated, the U.S. government agreed to make sure that the nation had an adequate housing stock. However, this agreement fell short of making housing an entitlement. At the end of World War II, the United Nations Declaration on Human...

It has been more than two decades since Chase Manhattan Bank security guards traveled from New York to Chicago in the dead of night and locked the gates at Wisconsin Steel, ushering in a decade of plant closings. During the 1990s, the United States began one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth in its history. By the end of that decade, official unemployment stood at just a little over 4 percent—the lowest rate since the early 1970s. But the reports of a hot economy throughout the 1990s masked an important reality of American life generally as well...

At the end of the previous chapter, I argued that ideological, theoretical, and political shifts as well as changes in the nature of the time-space-place context of production that encompass the new world order necessitate a change in the nature of organizing. Generally, previous chapters have demonstrated that the new world order has imposed inequalities throughout the world. The question becomes, How can millions of people negatively affected by these inequalities successfully contest them?

Thus far I have argued that the new world order is a global system for the accumulation of capital that includes mobile capital, goods, and services;...

Previous chapters have demonstrated that the political, economic, and ideological factors that have generated global institutions and rules for a new world order are the same as those that are generating local collisions in areas like housing and employment. Both global decisions and local collisions are an integral part of a new world order. For that reason, an effective movement to contest the terms and results of the new world order must unite movements aimed directly at global institutions and rules with those at a local level that are dealing specifically with their local impacts. In Chapter 8 I noted...