博客來＂Jonathan Smucker’s book about the American left’s paralyzing ambivalence about power and its tendency toward purism, fragmentation, and insularity?and what we might do about it?is desperately needed.＂?Astra Taylor, director of Žižek! and Examined Life
＂Jonathan Smucker is a critical voice within an important emerging political project whose aim is to move the next Left generation from symbolic and often self-marginalizing strategies toward approaches that can lead to effective main stage intervention.＂?Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air
＂If Saul Alinsky and Antonio Gramsci somehow had a bastard lovechild, he might be named Jonathan Smucker.＂?Andrew Boyd, co-editor of Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution.
A conceptual guide to political struggle for a social movement generation that is deeply ambivalent about power, How to Win Friends and Build Power makes a moral and strategic case for the intentional cultivation of collective power, organization, and leadership. Combining decades of grassroots organizing with a skillful use of social theory, Smucker digs into the structural constraints and subjective challenges of social movements that tend to gravitate toward symbolic forms of self-expression and insular identity-affirming rituals, often at the expense of real political intervention. At the same time, he shows how savvy groups have at times been able to successfully navigate such self-defeating dynamics, and win.
Jonathan Smucker is co-founder of Beyond the Choir, an organization providing strategic support and organizational development to social justice organizations. His work has been published in Berkeley Journal of Sociology and the Sociological Quarterly.
