How did the American working class lose its power—and why did the socialist Left fail to stop it?

In Born to Rebel, John Reimann recounts a lifetime of working-class struggle, from the civil rights movement and the New Left to decades of rank-and-file organizing in the Carpenters Union, culminating in the 1999 Bay Area wildcat strike and his expulsion from the union for life.

Part memoir, part political reckoning, Born to Rebel challenges conventional accounts of organized labor’s decline and confronts the socialist Left’s accommodation to union bureaucracies and authoritarian regimes abroad. Reimann asks what can be learned from these defeats—and what it would take to make socialism a political possibility again.

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