There have been attempts to describe this emerg­ing move­ment for social jus­tice in book form before. The lat­est, Nec­es­sary Trou­ble: Amer­i­cans in Revolt by Sarah Jaffe , is the best so far. The Nation Books pub­li­ca­tion was released Tuesday.

Some­thing is hap­pen­ing. Social­ism is no longer a dirty word (the ​“ S‑word ”), but some­thing a size­able por­tion of Amer­i­cans tell poll­sters is their pre­ferred vision for soci­ety . It’s no longer an anachro­nism to speak of ​“the Left.” A brave and quick­ly orga­nized move­ment for black lives has not only sparked a new civ­il rights move­ment but has got­ten many of us to see the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem for what it is: the evo­lu­tion of Jim Crow. Oh, and a hell of a lot more work­ers are strik­ing than before.

Jaffe, a free­lance writer whose work has appeared every­where from In These Times to The Guardian and The Atlantic, is a lead­ing light in the new gen­er­a­tion of labor and social jus­tice reporters. It wasn’t that long ago that if you had a cam­paign you want­ed to get in the press you had exact­ly two full-time labor reporters to lob­by to con­vince them that your cam­paign was inter­est­ing enough to war­rant fight­ing with their edi­tors to get it in print.

Now our move­ment has a slew of jour­nal­ists who dig deep and fol­low cam­paigns and move­ments over the long haul. The result is not just that good cam­paigns get press atten­tion, but that move­ments grow and expand as peo­ple read about them and get inspired to join or do some­thing similar.

Jaffe has a good eye for char­ac­ters and a great ear for what they have to say, mak­ing Nec­es­sary Trou­ble a very engag­ing read. She weaves a nar­ra­tive that con­nects the 2008 eco­nom­ic col­lapse to the out­rage that gave rise to the Tea Par­ty, the Wis­con­sin protests against Scott Walker’s union-bust­ing agen­da and Occu­py Wall Street. The move­ment for black lives, the Occu­py Homes protests against bank fore­clo­sures, the occu­pa­tion of the Repub­lic Win­dows and Doors fac­to­ry in Chica­go, stu­dent debt protests, the Chica­go teach­ers strike(s) and the rolling strikes led by OUR Wal­mart and the Fight for $15, Jaffe argues, are all con­nect­ed to a grow­ing sense among Amer­i­cans that the rules of the sys­tem are rigged against the work­ing class — and dou­bly or triply so against work­ers who are black, queer, young, old, immi­grants or women.

These move­ments are often ​“ana­lyzed as if they had each hap­pened in a vac­u­um,” she writes. ​“But in fact, as I fol­lowed them through the years, I would find sim­i­lar pat­terns and even direct con­nec­tions between them.”

The con­nec­tions come, in part, to activists’ increas­ing under­stand­ing of ​“inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty.” That is, accord­ing to Jaffe, a term used by pro­tes­tors to describe the way that peo­ple expe­ri­ence dif­fer­ent forms of oppres­sion (say, racism and sex­ism) as ​“inter­twined, over­lap­ping experiences.”

Inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty has become a main­stream enough con­cept that even Hillary Clin­ton felt the need to pay lip ser­vice to it on the cam­paign trail. ​“This gen­er­a­tion,” notes City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York pro­fes­sor Ruth Milk­man, ​“uses the word inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty as if it were a house­hold label.” Jaffe makes a good case that this is a strength of the emerg­ing movement.

Anoth­er con­cept that Jaffe empha­sizes in her book is ​“hor­i­zon­tal­ism” in social move­ment struc­tures. She defines the term as broad-based demo­c­ra­t­ic deci­sion-mak­ing with­out for­mal­ized lead­er­ship — where any mem­ber is free to speak out, pro­pose and car­ry out a move­ment action.

“The ide­al of hor­i­zon­tal­ism,” Jaffe writes ​“is con­nect­ed to the sense that democ­ra­cy, in this coun­try, is fail­ing, or per­haps, as some are com­ing to believe, that it nev­er real­ly worked.”

She points to Occu­py Wall Street as the most obvi­ous exam­ple of the movement’s hor­i­zon­tal­ism and exper­i­men­ta­tion with democ­ra­cy. Occu­py, I must say, nev­er struck me as par­tic­u­lar­ly new. It’s more like a wel­come return of the Direct Action Net­work (DAN). Nev­er a for­mal orga­ni­za­tion, the activist net­work was respon­si­ble for the 1999 Seat­tle protests that shut down a meet­ing of the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion and went on to dis­rupt meet­ings of the World Bank and Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund and the Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic conventions.

The lack of elect­ed lead­ers, the con­sen­sus deci­sion-mak­ing with ​“block­ing con­cerns” and ​“stand asides” — even the ​“spir­it fin­gers” to silent­ly mark agree­ment — all of it first appeared in the DNA of DAN. The fact that a decade and a half lat­er we are still rein­vent­ing the same wheel sug­gests the need for some more per­ma­nent organizations.

Jaffe agrees. ​“The next chal­lenge for the move­ments,” she writes, ​“will be cre­at­ing orga­ni­za­tions that last, that suit the needs of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry trou­ble­mak­ers, that can be flex­i­ble and still endur­ing, that can over­lap and con­nect up with one anoth­er and cre­ate more long-term plans for the future they want to see.”

There is a deep-seat­ed aver­sion to for­mal orga­ni­za­tion on the Left. Part of it is, as Jaffe notes, the fear of a move­ment becom­ing dom­i­nat­ed by ​“charis­mat­ic lead­ers.” But part of it too, I think, is charis­mat­ic lead­ers not want­i­ng to deal with the indig­ni­ties of demo­c­ra­t­ic accountability.

I wor­ry that Jaffe’s read­ers will take the word ​“hor­i­zon­tal­ism” and use it to jus­ti­fy and fetishize a lack of for­mal orga­ni­za­tion. A bet­ter word, I think, is one she quotes to describe the move­ment for black lives: ​“lead­er­full.” That is a con­cept that doesn’t pre­clude dues-pay­ing mem­ber­ship, elect­ed com­mit­tees and for­mal­ized lead­er­ship. It’s more about main­tain­ing a cul­ture where good ideas, speak­ers and writ­ers that come ​“from the floor” are not mere­ly tol­er­at­ed but active­ly solicited.

Two good exam­ples of lead­er­full orga­niz­ing that Jaffe high­lights come from labor. In 2008, the work­ers at Chicago’s Repub­lic Win­dows and Doors fac­to­ry engaged in a sit-down strike. Their lead­ers at the Unit­ed Elec­tri­cal, Radio and Machine Work­ers of Amer­i­ca union (UE) had pro­posed a small, sym­bol­ic civ­il dis­obe­di­ence action. The work­ers took that idea and ran with it — lock­ing the boss­es out and even­tu­al­ly win­ning their owed sev­er­ance. They even got a shot at run­ning the busi­ness them­selves as a cooperative.

The sec­ond exam­ple was in 2012, when the Chica­go Teach­ers Union (CTU) struck against Rahm Emanuel’s give­back demands. Rank-and-file activists engaged in some pret­ty deep coali­tion build­ing and pick­et cap­tains were giv­en wide lat­i­tude with how to con­duct their protests. The result was a tra­di­tion­al union strike that got con­vert­ed into a com­mu­ni­ty protest against aus­ter­i­ty and cor­po­rate ​“ed reform.”

There’s no short­age of for­mal struc­ture and elect­ed lead­ers in labor. And while the UE and CTU are obvi­ous­ly excep­tion­al unions, lead­er­full orga­niz­ing is more preva­lent (and cer­tain­ly has more poten­tial) than is com­mon­ly recognized.

To her cred­it, union activists and cam­paigns are described through­out Jaffe’s nar­ra­tive as essen­tial to a move­ment fight­ing for an end to injus­tice and inequal­i­ty. But I’m slight­ly dis­ap­point­ed that she didn’t delve into the recent rise in strike activ­i­ty. Many of these strikes — like at Kohler and Ver­i­zon — were big, vis­i­ble wins for workers.

There’s been so much writ­ten about work­er cen­ters and ​“alt labor” that it’s begin­ning to skew the mar­ket for labor writ­ing. Yes, there’s a lot of action in alter­na­tive mod­els of work­er orga­niz­ing, but old (not so) Big Labor is also show­ing encour­ag­ing signs of renewed mil­i­tan­cy. Activists will learn from each oth­er by exam­ple, and books like this must con­nect the dots.

To that point, Jaffe tells a delight­ful and inspir­ing sto­ry about the first night that then-New York May­or Michael Bloomberg attempt­ed to clear an Occu­py encamp­ment at the new­ly rechris­tened Lib­er­ty Park, near Wall Street, because it had to be cleaned. Occu­py activists spent the night scrub­bing the park down and, at dawn, were joined by hun­dreds of union activists, in their respec­tive union col­ors, to stare down riot police. Bloomberg blinked and ordered law enforce­ment to with­draw. Jaffe reports that a burly orange-shirt­ed mem­ber of the Labor­ers’ union turned to her to say, ​“This is power.”