“The Manzese Declaration,” issued by a group of women market vendors from the Manzese neighborhood of Dar es Salaam, includes the statement: “There is no upper-class person who will liberate us. We the poor, we will liberate ourselves, and our primary weapon is our unity and solidarity.”

This declaration, a programmatic call to arms, appears as an epilogue in Working People Against the Free Market (Wavujajasho Dhidi ya Soko Huria), a remarkable collection of essays edited by activist and academic, Sabatho Nyamsenda. The declaration—included in English translation at the end of this review—offers a rallying conclusion to a book all about workforce solidarity.

The central preoccupation in Nyamsenda’s collection is less whether such solidarity is possible and more how it can be achieved. How can a fragmented and precarious working class of market vendors, street hawkers, bus conductors, motorcycle taxi drivers, coffee farmers, and miners unite against exploitative labor relations and, in the process, transform them?

One reason for the book’s activist emphasis is the profile of its contributors, many of whom are themselves precariously employed workers and organizers. Although frank about the systemic challenges they face, their interest lies in finding collective strategies to fight back. It is their first-person testimonies that make Working People a stand-out text on precarious and informal sector labor, be it in Tanzania or Africa more broadly.

Working People does not romanticize collective action nor its transformative potential. It does, however, argue that any effort to tackle poverty, exploitation, and authoritarian power relations must begin with organized labor. And as modeled by the design of the book itself, any intellectual contribution should be anchored in actual struggle, responding to its needs, recognizing its failings, and expanding the web of solidarity to build for future success.