Cal Winslow

Cal Winslow, PhD, is author of Labor’s Civil War in California: The NUHW Healthcare Workers’ Rebellion (PM Press, 2010) and an active supporter of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), believing that “an injury to one is an injury for all.” He writes first-hand accounts of their battles for CounterPunch. He is an historian trained at Antioch College and Warwick University, at Warwick under the direction of the late Edward Thompson. He is a coauthor with Thompson and others of Albion’s Fatal Tree (Penguin and Pantheon, 1975). He edited Waterfront Workers: New Perspectives on Race and Class (University of Illinois Press, 1998) and coedited Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from the Below in the Long 1970s. (Verso 2010). He is a coeditor with Iain Boal, Janferie Stone and Michael Watts of the forthcoming West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press 2011).He is a fellow in Environmental Politics at UC Berkeley and is Director of the Mendocino Institute. He is a founding member of Mendocino Parents for Peace and is associated with the Bay Area collective Retort. He lives with his family near Caspar on the Mendocino Coast.

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Praise

“As a gray army of undertakers gather in Sacramento to bury California’s great dreams of equality and justice, this wonderful book, with its faith in the continuity of our state’s radical-communitarian ethic, replants the seedbeds of defiant imagination and hopeful resistance.” —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Magical Urbanism

“Utopias—we can’t live without them, nor within them, for long. In West of Eden we see California, an earthly utopia, and the Sixties, a utopian moment, in full flower. Brave souls creating a heavenly host of communal spaces on the edge of America, hoping to break free of a world of capital, sexism, oligarchy, race. An amazing place and time that, for all its failures, changed the world—and which finally gets its due in this marvelous collection.”  —Richard Walker, UC Berkeley, author of The Country in The City

“There are a lot of versions of the sixties, and this is one that isn’t stale or familiar, a book by a lot of good writers and original thinkers about how some much older ideas about the commons and the community were tinkered with, enlarged upon, turned into experiments that sometimes succeeded, sometimes failed, but left legacies that mattered. It’s also a book about California’s tendency to go experimental, idealistic, and eclectic, a fit successor to the classic California’s Utopian Colonies that looked at some of the great nineteenth-century experiments.”  —Rebecca Solnit, author of Storming the Gates of Paradise

“The counterculture—from the North Beach Parnassus to the underground press—and ‘the Movement’—from Marxists to anarchists—all of it depended on a magnificent base, and here it is described, magnificently: the Oakland breakfast program, the Alcatraz occupation, the Mime troupe, and pot farms, the communes, the collectives, the co-ops of California during the 1960s. On the lam? A bad trip? Burnt out? Cracking up? AWOL? Dropping out? Requiring metamorphosis? These could provide rural and urban alternatives to Cold War, patriarchy, speed-up, or death in the jungle. With roots in previous decades of struggle by trade unions, ethnic enclaves, religious breakaways, and nineteenth-century dreams, and with branches in the lore of our own contemporary foodways, child-rearing practices, decision-making and meeting protocols, sexual politics, and DIY culture, the California communards cleared the path. Both veterans and young folk, grey hairs and newbies will find beautiful memoire, authentic experience, and brilliant analysis in these pages West of Eden.”  —Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto

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Praise

“The emergence of NUHW has been one of the most exciting recent developments in US labor. From the ashes of the old, health care workers in California are trying to build something that’s new, different, and definitely worth fighting for. Cal Winslow’s account of their difficult struggle is moving and insightful-—and maybe even a road map for others to follow.”
—Steve Early, labor activist and journalist, author of Embedded with Organized Labor

“Highly informative. And the spirit is invigorating.”
–Noam Chomsky

“The civil war inside the SEIU is a tragic story, yet as Cal Winslow emphasizes in this urgent and dramatic account, it may contain the seeds of authentic renewal in the American labor movement.”
–Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

“I am a witness to how hard these workers have fought to have their own organization, to have the quality organization and the high standards they have won. I want to commend these workers and the high quality of their leadership – I have worked with them for years. I understand why they are fighting so hard now to rebuild their organization, now the NUHW. This is a book that that everyone needs to read…”
-—Dolores Huerta

“Strange tales from the gothic wing of the capitalist health industry, complete with vampires and leeches. In this instant classic of journalism from below, one of the pioneers of radical social history reports on remarkable signs of life in the morbid body of American labor.”
—Iain Boal, Retort

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Book Events

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Reviews

• Union Democracy Starts at Bottom
• Labor’s Civil War: Talking Union
• Labor’s Civil War on Labor Notes
• West of Eden on MidWest Book Review
• West of Eden on Z Mag
• West of Eden: A CHOICE Review
• Notes from the Underground
• West of Eden reviewed in Humboldt Journal of Social Relations
• West of Eden: A Review in Slingshot

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Interviews

• Labor’s Civil War on ZNet

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Mentions

• Jeffrey Lustig Passes, Many Mourn

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Blog