The path through decades of working class defeat is much discussed but little studied. Azzellini and Kraft's book The Class Strikes Back seeks to change that by helping to fill one of the most glaring holes in class analysis today. It offers a compilation of detailed analyses of workers organizing to shift the balance of power between capital and workers, or what is otherwise known as class composition, from 13 countries and nearly every continent. Everyone involved in and studying working class self-organizing needs to not only read this book but use it as a model for continuing this long overdue work.

The Class Strikes Back is really a study of four kinds of workers movements, some of which overlap. The first are the weakest part of the book, those that examine what is called “labor NGOs” in which unions and NGOs forsake working class organizing for Alinsky style “mobiliz- ing” to “advocate” on behalf of workers in Egypt, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, and Colombia.