Stanley Aronowitz

False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness

This classic study of the American working class, originally published in 1973, is now back in print with a new introduction and epilogue by the author. An innovative blend of first-person experience and original scholarship, Aronowitz traces the historical development of the American working class from post-Civil War times and shows why radical movements have failed to overcome the forces that tend to divde groups of workers from one another. The rise of labor unions is analyzed, as well as their decline as a force for social change. Aronowitz’s new introduction situates the book in the context of developments in current scholarship and the epilogue discusses the effects of recent economic and political changes in the American labor movement.

Culture and Politics

PERHAPS it was the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and especially the dramatic May events in Francc in 1968 and the strike movements among students and young workers in Italy and other advanced capitalist countries that has led to a reexamination of the Mlarxist theory of culture, for in the short decade, it appeared that consciousncss and its material preconditions were not entirely in correspondence. Social movements were like works of art. They proposed a new norm of social struggle and the conduct of everyday life that had been declared beyond the pale of the revolutionary movement by both Stalinist and Trotskyist theoreticians: the idea that the revolution in social relations, in the conduct of everyday life, that is, the so-called cultural revolution, had to be seen as equally important as the problem of taking power over the means of production. The rejection of the hierarchical conception of the revolution, of its two stage character in which the problems of sexuality, work organization, personal relations, and culture had to await the seizure of state power and the completion of the transition between capitalism and the new socialist society, raised serious problems for the Marxists theory of revolution and of culture in particular. However, the terms in which the cultural debate has been framed

The Politics of Identity : Class, Culture, Social Movements

In The Politics of Identity, Stanley Aronowitz offers provocative analysis of the complex interactions of class, politics, and culture. Beginning with the premise that culture is constitutive of class identities, he demonstrates that while feminist analyses of both racial and gay movements have discussed these components of culture, class contributions to cultural identity have yet to be fully examined. In these essays, he uses class as a category for cultural analysis, ranging over issues of ethnicity, race and gender, portrayals of class and culture in the media, as well as a range of other issues related to postmodernism.

Against Schooling: Education and Social Class

At the dawn of the new century no American institution is invested with a greater role to bring the young and their parents into the modernist regime than public schools. The common school is charged with the task of preparing children and youth for their dual responsibilities to the social order: citizenship and, perhaps its primary task, learning to labor. On the one hand, in the older curriculum on the road to citizenship in a democratic, secular society, schools are supposed to transmit the jewels of the enlightenment, especially literature and science. On the other hand, students are to be prepared for the work world by means of a loose but definite stress on the redemptive value of work, the importance of family, and of course the imperative of love and loyalty to ones country.

Marx, Braverman, and the Logic of Capital

The power and scope of large-scale industry among advanced capitalist societies have it incredibly difficult for us to imagine a different mode of material production. We are all convinced that artisanship in our epoch is merely a form of bourgeois ideology, whose effect, if not intention, is to foster illusions of mobility among workers, and to create an artificial hierarchy within the labor process. The few instances of handicraft that remain in our social world are considered to be so marginal that we have learned to take for granted the mechanization of the labor process and its consequences for the transformation of the content of labor.

Comments on Michael Burawoy's “The Critical Turn to Public Sociology”

I came to sociology after working in the steel industry for more than nine years and for unions as an organizer for another seven. In addition to my writing and teaching I spend a good deal of time as a union activist, have been elected a re-elected to the executive council of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of nearly 20,000 faculty and staff of the City University of New York. I write occasionally for non-academic publications, appear on radio and television commenting on public issues, am interviewed by the European and Latin American press on politics and economic questions, routinely give talks to community and labor groups on a variety of subjects ranging from politics, science and technology, education and work and the labor movement. Two of the last four of my books were published by trade presses. My relationship to sociology as a discipline is, consequently, tenuous. Although I have contributed, among others, to Theory and Society, the American Journal of Sociology and to this journal’s ancestor, The Insurgent Sociologist, and I teach in a PhD sociology program, I have never considered myself a sociologist, (and most professional sociologists have always been puzzled by my stuff ). I am a member of the ASA because I advise PhD students who need jobs since, apart from media and communications, there are few academic departments who hire outside the discipline. But mainly because I am not a professional sociologist, in Burawoy’s sense of the phrase, I attend ASA only when invited to present in a city I want to visit, or when one or more of my students is on the job market and my presence may help get them an interview. I have organized only

Post-work : the wages of cybernation

In Post-Work, Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler have collected essays from a variety of scholars to discuss the dreary future of work. The introduction, The Post-Work Manifesto,, provides the framework for a radical reappraisal of work and suggests an alternative organization of labor. The provocative essays that follow focus on specific issues that are key to our reconceptualization of the notion and practice of work, with coverage of the fight for shorter hours, the relationship between school and work, and the role of welfare, among others. Armed with an interdisciplinary approach, Post-Work looks beyond the rancorous debates around welfare politics and lays out the real sources of anxiety in the modern workplace. The result is an offering of hope for the future--an alternative path for a cybernation, where the possibility of less work for a better standard of living is possible.

High Technology and Work Tomorrow

Science and technology developments over the past 25 years have had profound effects on workplace productivity and income. Prevailing wisdom holds that significant levels of investment in plant and equipment and the consequent economic growth lead, in the context of a market economy, to more permanent jobs. The authors contest this claim. They argue that the tendency of technology investment is inherently labor saving, in both goods production and the services. Most new jobs that are being created, primarily in the services, have been contingent, part-time, benefit free, and frequently temporary. Thus there will be a shortage of decent-paying permanent jobs in the future. The authors argue that the premise of economic and social policy must take work as an active presupposition.

The Unknown Herbert Marcuse

The year 1998 is the hundredth anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s birth. After decades of teaching and writing for relatively limited, mostly academic audiences, in the 1960s he became a figure of international renown, and some of his books became bestsellers. But it seems that he had just fifteen minutes of fame; his work is now out of fashion and virtually unread by students, activists, and academics, save for the narrow circle of those who work and teach in the tradition of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Nevertheless, due to one of those mysterious conjunctions of history and thought, Marcuse was one of the figures from which Russell Jacoby derived his model of the “public” intellectual. A philosopher who never ceased to remind his readers that he was an “orthodox Marxist,” he borrowed freely from the phenomenological tradition, especially its Heideggerian spin; from sociology, mainly Max Weber’s; and, most famously, from the metatheories of Sigmund Freud regarding the relation of the individual to society.1

The End of Political Economy

The world-wide crisis of capitalism which has been gaining momentum since the early 1970’s has simultaneously elevated Marxism to a new status. The collapse of both neo-Marxist and Keynesian certainties that late capitalism possessed an almost infinite capacity to stave off a breakdown led social and economic theory to look once more to “classical” Marxist explanations of the crisis. Within academic circles there is no question that Marxist political economy, although by no means hegemonic, gains new adherents with each passing leading indicator showing a more or less chronic tendency in the western countries towards stagnation if not complete reversal of the almost thirty years of uninterrupted growth in most capitalist nations.