Content:

"Refuse work. Revolt against capitalism. Read Harry Cleaver. In that order. Repeat."

Join Pilsen Community Books as we welcome organizers and co-editors Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter to the store for a conversation with activist and Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power co-author James Tracy, on their new book 'Points of Departure: Refusal of Work and the Crisis of Capitalism: The Collected Writings of Harry Cleaver.' Points of Departure is a definitive collection of Harry Cleaver’s best unpublished, translated, or lesser known writings on the refusal of work, class composition and “inversion of the class perspective,” the crisis of capitalism. He shows the ongoing necessity of re-reading Marx theory to understand, find points of departure from, and “finally end capitalism before it ends us. Points of Departure will be released on Common Notion Press’s new Class Compositions series in September 2026. This special edition and release coincides with the Labor Notes conference.

Robert Ovetz holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas–Austin and is a senior lecturer in Political Science at San José State University, where he teaches labor relations in the MPA program and focuses on academic labor organizing and the labor movement. He is the author of When Workers Shot Back (Brill, 2018 and Haymarket, 2019), We the Elites (Pluto, 2022), and the forthcoming Rebels for the System (Haymarket), and is co-authoring a book on organizing against AI in higher education. Robert is co-editor with Kari Lydersen and Kevin Van Meter of Real World Labor, Vol. 4 (Dollars & Sense, 2024). He is also an editor and contributor to critical labor studies volumes, a labor writer for Dollars & Sense, and has been published widely in multiple languages. His writings can be found at sjsu.academia.edu/RobertOvetzPhD.

Kevin Van Meter is a union organizer and labor educator who writes on contemporary labor issues, labor history, and working-class self-organization. He is co-editor with Kari Lydersen and Robert Ovetz of Real World Labor, Vol. 4 (Dollars & Sense, 2024). He is author of Guerrillas of Desire (AK Press, 2017), co-editor of Uses of a Whirlwind (AK Press, 2010), and has two forthcoming books: Reading Struggles: Working-Class Self-Activity from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (AK Press) and The American Worker: International History, Reception, and Responses (Common Notions). His work has appeared in New Politics, Notes from Below, Dollars and Sense, Truthout, Labor Notes, Work-Bites, The Chief Leader, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, and other publications.

James Tracy is a long-time social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area, and author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco's Housing Wars. He co-authored with Amy Sonnie Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (Melville House, September 2011). He is the founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and has been active in the Eviction Defense Network and the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. He has edited two activist handbooks for Manic D Press, The Civil Disobedience Handbook, and The Military Draft Handbook. His writing has appeared in Left Turn, Race Poverty and the Environment, Contemporary Justice Review, and the Political Edge, a City Lights Foundation anthology.