"Renewing workers' education focuses on educational methods created by workers for workers. It extends beyond trade unions to include a range of educational initiatives aimed at the working class including working class women, casual and informal sector workers, migrant workers, and workers' political parties. This book fills a gap in the South African literature on workers' education and documents the recent history as well as current practices and perspectives, including some international experiences. It explores conceptual tools that may assist in reflecting on and theorising the practice of workers' education and analyses current challenges. This captivating book also seeks to inform future policy and practices on workers' education and is key for those who wish to reinvigorate and contribute to building an alternative future for workers' education." --Back cover.

“[Cass’s] core principle—a culture of respect for work of all kinds—can help close the gap dividing the two Americas....” – William A. Galston, The Brookings Institution The American worker is in crisis. Wages have stagnated for more than a generation. Reliance on welfare programs has surged. Life expectancy is falling as substance abuse and obesity rates climb. These woes are not the inevitable result of irresistible global and technological forces. They are the direct consequence of a decades-long economic consensus that prioritized increasing consumption—regardless of the costs to American workers, their families, and their communities. Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency focused attention on the depth of the nation’s challenges, yet while everyone agrees something must change, the Left’s insistence on still more government spending and the Right’s faith in still more economic growth are recipes for repeating the mistakes of the past. In this groundbreaking re-evaluation of American society, economics, and public policy, Oren Cass challenges our basic assumptions about what prosperity means and where it comes from to reveal how we lost our way. The good news is that we can still turn things around—if the nation’s proverbial elites are willing to put the American worker’s interests first. Which is more important, pristine air quality, or well-paying jobs that support families? Unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world, or renewed investment in the employment of Americans? Smoothing the path through college for the best students, or ensuring that every student acquires the skills to succeed in the modern economy? Cutting taxes, expanding the safety net, or adding money to low-wage paychecks? The renewal of work in America demands new answers to these questions. If we reinforce their vital role, workers supporting strong families and communities can provide the foundation for a thriving, self-sufficient society that offers opportunity to all.

Written 1902 (CW 8) "As simultaneously mysticism and fact, Christianity is a breakthrough in the historical development of humanity, for which the mysteries, with the results that they brought about, form a prior evolutionary stage." --Rudolf Steiner During the fall and winter of 1901-02, Steiner gave a series of lectures called "Christianity as Mystical Fact" to members of the Theosophical Society. The lectures were rewritten and issued as a book later that year. They mark a watershed in the development of Western esotericism. Steiner wrote of the idea behind his book: "The title Christianity as Mystical Fact was one I gave to this work eight years ago, when I gathered together the content of lectures given in 1902. It was meant to indicate the special approach adopted in the book. Its theme is not just the mystical side of Christianity in a historical presentation. It was meant to show, from the standpoint of a mystical awareness, how Christianity came into being. "Behind this was the idea that spiritual happenings were factors in the emergence of Christianity, which could only be observed from such a point of view. It is for the book itself to demonstrate that, by 'mystical,' I do not in any way imply a vague intuition rather than strict scientific argument. In many circles, mysticism is understood as just that, and therefore it is distinguished from the concerns of all 'genuine' science. "In this book, however, I use the term to mean a 'presentation of spiritual reality'--a reality accessible only to a knowledge drawn from the sources of spiritual life itself. Anyone who denies the possibility of such knowledge in principle will find its contents hard to comprehend; any reader who accepts the idea that mysticism may coexist with the clarity of the natural sciences, may acknowledge that the mystical aspect of Christianity must be described mystically." This is a significant book--for Steiner's own development, that of Western esotericism, and our own understanding of the Christ event. Readers will find the evolutionary development from the ancient Mysteries through the great Greek philosophers to the events portrayed in the Gospels. Included are an informative introduction and annotated notes by Andrew Welburn and an afterword by Michael Debus, a priest of The Christian Community, who summarizes the book and places it in context. This book is a translation from German of Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertum (GA 8). Cover image: Photo of Bordeaux Cathedral by James Nicholls.

Activist and Socially Critical School and Community Renewal comes about at an incredibly important point in history, and it offers a genuinely new paradigm. This book attempts what few others have tried—to bring together knowledge and literature around school reform and community renewal through authentic ethnographic stories of real schools and communities.

In the first book in their series on Marxism and Education, Rikowski and Green use Marxist theory to examine the dialectic between race and power in education. The series is aimed at educationalists - teachers, researchers, policy-makers or administrators, as well as activists who consider the Marxist tradition a valuable and important resource.

. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.

Unions face a once in a generation opportunity for renewal. Decades of decline have been compounded by a global elite who increasingly generate profit from financial engineering in ways that side-step labour and undermine the power of organised workers. However, as this economic system begins to falter, there are signs of a renewed union movement emerging. Debt-laden firms – from supermarkets and nursery chains to outsourcing giants – are collapsing, and workers are organising to determine what comes next. Unionised bank cashiers are refusing to push predatory loans, teachers are striking against the exploitative housing market, and manufacturing workers are pooling redundancy pay to buy-out plants and become worker owners. Alice Martin and Annie Quick argue that these are seeds of union renewal. To be effective in an age of finance, the union movement must set its ambitions beyond narrow wage-bargaining, and towards the financial systems that have infiltrated workplaces and impoverished communities. By doing so, they can play a critical role in ushering in a new, democratic economy. No-one committed to economic justice can afford to miss this urgent, highly original book and its radical vision for unions.