Marcy Rein

Marcy Rein Photo by Scott Braley

Marcy Rein is a writer, organizer and editor who has engaged with a wide range of social movements and organizational forms over the last 40 years, including publication collectives, labor and community organizations, and electoral campaigns. Her articles have appeared in women’s, queer, labor, and left publications from the pioneering radical feminist newspaper Off Our Backs to Race, Poverty & the Environment. In the 1990s she edited the Northern California progressive monthly News for a People’s World and the National Writers Union quarterly, American Writer.

Marcy worked as a community organizer in eastern Arkansas in ACORN’s early days, participated in a rank-and-file caucus as a member of SEIU 722 in Washington, D.C., and spent almost 12 years with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union as a writer and sometimes editor on its newspaper and as the communications specialist for its organizing department. She worked on the Prevention Point needle exchange in San Francisco when it was still a civil disobedience project, and served as an elected Board member for the self-managed Atchison Village Mutual Homes Corp. in Richmond, CA. Most recently, working with Urban Habitat, she has provided communications support to grassroots groups fighting for environmental and transportation justice in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Free City! The Fight for San Francisco’s City College and Education for All

SKU: 9781629638294
Author: Marcy Rein, Mickey Ellinger, and Vicki Legion • Foreword by Pauline Lipman
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-62963-829-4
Published: 12/2020
Format: Paperback
Size: 6×9
Pages: 288
Subjects: History-California / Education-History

$20.00
$8.95 (e-Book)

Praise

“The fight to save City College is one of the most remarkable in the long history of progressive politics in San Francisco. It offers hope and practical lessons in opposing the neoliberal agendas of austerity, exclusion, and privatization. For decades, California bled dry the greatest public education system in the world. Turning that around will take years of struggle by the people demanding their lost rights and public investment in their children. As City College showed, victory is possible and the battle will be led by the new working majority of color, who have already turned California blue and may yet save us from the depredations of the billionaires and madmen who rule America today.”
—Richard Walker, author of Pictures of a Gone City, The Conquest of Bread, The Country in the City, and The Atlas of California

“The struggle and success of Free City proves that when people organize, persist, and resist injustice, they win!”
—Diane Ravitch, founder and president, Network for Public Education; author of The Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools

“The struggle to keep open City College of San Francisco, the largest community college in the nation, was one of perseverance, collaboration and ultimately a commitment by the faculty and staff of the college and people of San Francisco to fight for a remarkable institution. Authors Marcy Rein, Mickey Ellinger, and Vicki Legion have made an important contribution to understanding the scope of this five-year battle. At its core the fight to keep open the college revealed a much larger narrative at play in American public education: shaping our schools to meet the needs of the marketplace and its advocates or molding schools to meet the needs of students, working people, seniors and veterans. Ultimately, this struggle highlights the strength of combining a broad community of faculty, the people of the city and unions. It should serve as a template for other battles.”
—Josh Pechtalt, president emeritus of the California Federation of Teachers

“Free City! is a true organizer’s tale. This exciting and deeply researched book describes the twists and turns of a five-year struggle that began as a defensive fight to preserve a hallowed San Francisco institution, City College, and evolved into a stunning victory that achieved tuition free education for the City’s residents. There are heroes like Alisa Messer, the brilliant leader of AFT Local 2121 representing faculty. There are villains like Barbara Beno, the corporate ‘educator’ who launched a withering attack on CCSF’s accreditation. It is a book with a happy ending and lots of lessons for organizers, educators and anybody who cares about public education in America.”
—Peter B. Olney, retired Organizing Director, ILWU International Longshore and Warehouse Union


Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements

Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements

SKU: 9781604867947
Editors: Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein • Foreword by Raúl Zibechi
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781604867947
Published: 1/2014
Format: Paperback, ePub, mobi, PDF
Size: 6 x 9
Page count: 528
Subjects: Politics-Social Movements/Latin America

$29.95
$8.95 (e-Book)

Praise

“This is the book we’ve been waiting for. Anyone interested in the explosion of social movements in Latin America—and the complex interplay between those forces and the ‘Pink Tide’ governments—should inhale this book immediately. Until the Rulers Obey gives us country-specific context from a superb team of ‘introducers,’ who then step aside so we can hear a chorus of voices from some of the most inspiring grassroots organizations on the continent. This is a people’s history in real time, bubbling up from below.”
—Avram David “Avi” Lewis, documentary filmmaker and former host of Al Jazeera English show Fault Lines and Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“Latin America is the last region in the world that still has a vibrant Enlightenment left, which sets both the practical agenda in terms of policy and the horizon in terms of utopia. This wonderfully edited collection of analysis and first-person accounts shows why. It assembles people who are both activists and analysts, who see no difference between interpreting and changing the world. It deserves a wide audience.”
—Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop and Fordlandia

“A new world is dawning in Latin America from the bottom up. This book brings an all-star cast of scholar-activists together with social movement and community leaders from throughout the region. The reader will hear the clarion call for social justice from those who are on the front lines of grassroots resistance and popular struggles in this age of globalization, crisis, and transformation. These are the voices that too often are suppressed by the powerful and the means of communication they control. I cannot imagine a more important and timely volume for scholars and activists who wish to understand the transformations that are sweeping the sub-continent.”
—William I. Robinson, Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, author of Latin America and Global Capitalism

“Until the Rulers Obey is a profoundly necessary book. Little has been published about Latin America in the way of an overview from 1989 to the present, even less in the voices of the protagonists themselves. The great experiments of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s failed, but new and in many cases less dogmatic approaches to social justice have taken root in a number of countries south of the border. This book explores those efforts, often in the words of the change-makers themselves. Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein have done us a great service. Read this book for access to what the U.S. corporate media still doesn’t want us to know.”
—Margaret Randall, author of Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, When I Look Into the Mirror and See You, and Che on My Mind

“Until the Rulers Obey is the most exhaustive and comprehensive work of primary source material from social movements in Latin America to appear in English, presenting the testimony of the brave women and men who have challenged the old leaders, and are serving notice on the new aspirants to power that they can only rule legitimately if they listen to the voices and demands of the people. In addition to providing a report on the current state of popular struggles, this anthology compiled by Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein will also serve as a compendium for future writers and historians who want to understand the social movements that transformed Latin America during the early years of the new millennium.”
—Roger Burbach, co-author of Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Socialism


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