“A union is a great way to meet new people, and argue with them,” writes Hamilton Nolan in his 2024 book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Nolan rightfully emphasizes the value of workplace democracy and its many opportunities for constructive argument in building a union movement to fight capitalism.

Books and blogs are also great ways for organizers to interact with lots of people, and argue with them. Democracy, or more accurately in this context, a productive discourse of back and forth, exploration, and experimentation is something the labor movement doesn’t have nearly enough of. Partly this is due to a dearth of good writing about strategy in the labor movement today.

Nolan’s The Hammer and Eric Blanc’s 2025 book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big are well-written and carefully argued. In this way they are exactly the kind of books that we need more of to create a culture of informed and healthy debate on the labor left.