When will dissident members of a Congress successfully seize power from their party leaders and fellow lawmakers? When they organize.

Globalization is taking a step backward. What, then, is the best way to organize a global enterprise? The key, Steven Weber explains, is to prepare for a world increasingly made up of competing regions with distinct rules and standards. This new condition could be more prosperous, but there will also be more friction and therefore more risk.

Most of our communities are fragmented and at odds within themselves. Businesses, social services, education, and health care each live within their own worlds. The same is true of individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. What keeps this from changing is that we are trapped in an old and tired conversation about who we are. If this narrative does not shift, we will never truly create a common future and work toward it together. What Peter Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation. How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? What can individuals and formal leaders do to create a place they want to inhabit? We know what healthy communities look like—there are many success stories out there. The challenge is how to create one in our own place. Block helps us see how we can change the existing context of community from one of deficiencies, interests, and entitlement to one of possibility, generosity, and gifts. Questions are more important than answers in this effort, which means leadership is not a matter of style or vision but is about getting the right people together in the right way: convening is a more critical skill than commanding. As he explores the nature of community and the dynamics of transformation, Block outlines six kinds of conversation that will create communal accountability and commitment and describes how we can design physical spaces and structures that will themselves foster a sense of belonging. In Community, Peter Block explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.

Traversing more than a century of American history, this book advances a new theory of congressional organization to explain why and how party dissidents rely on institutions of their own making, arguing that these intraparty organizations can radically shift the balance of power between party leaders and rank-and-file members. Intraparty organizations empower legislators of varying ideological stripes to achieve collective and coordinated action by providing selective incentives to cooperative members, transforming public-good policies into excludable accomplishments, and helping members to institute rules and procedures to promote group decision making. Drawing on rich archival evidence and interview data, the book details the challenges dissident lawmakers encounter when they face off against party leaders and their efforts to organize in response. Eight case studies complicate our understanding of landmark fights over rules reform, early twentieth-century economic struggles, mid-century battles over civil rights legislation, and contemporary debates over national health care and fiscal policy.

Desperate to escape South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent. So she headed to Russia looking for some excitement—commencing what would become a four-year, twelve-nation Communist bloc tour that shattered her preconceived notions of the “Evil Empire.” In Around the Bloc, Griest relates her experiences as a volunteer at a children’s shelter in Moscow, a propaganda polisher at the office of the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language mouthpiece in Beijing, and a belly dancer among the rumba queens of Havana. She falls in love with an ex-soldier who narrowly avoided radiation cleanup duties at Chernobyl, hangs out with Cuban hip-hop artists, and comes to difficult realizations about the meaning of democracy. is the absorbing story of a young journalist driven by a desire to witness the effects of Communism. Along the way, she learns the Russian mathematical equation for buying dinner-party vodka (one bottle per guest, plus an extra), stumbles upon Beijing’s underground gay scene, marches with 100,000 mothers demanding Elián González’s return to Cuba, and gains a new appreciation for the Mexican culture she left behind.

A plan to win for the British left, from the co-founder of Momentum Our Bloc is a blueprint for a new combination of left-wing forces in Britain. James Schneider proposes a movement-party organisation that acts in society and in the Labour Party, through which party members, social movements, trade unions and socialist-inclined MPs could coordinate their political work. He adapts Chantal Mouffe’s theory of left populism to set out how the bloc could popularise socialist ideas and bend the parameters of politics towards its demands. Socialist perspectives are now rarely heard in mainstream public debate, after five years under Jeremy Corbyn when the left had some success in shaping political discourse. There is a large base of potential activists and an even larger section of the population available for mobilisation, but no central force to unite and organise them. Calls to ‘stay and fight’ against Keir Starmer’s failing leadership of the Labour Party are inadequate: socialists need a platform from which to do it. Schneider presents his Left Bloc as a pole of attraction for everyone seeking fundamental economic, social, political and environmental change. In this incisive book he sets out a plan for the next ten years: to build power, weaken our opponents and prepare ourselves for the next surge.