Most people think of class as a ranking systemthe more you have, the higher your class status. In contrast to this view, in this new study author Gus Bagakis demonstrates that class is a tool that explains how the capitalist system works and why the class struggle is invisible.Capitalism was and is a developing system in which the working class is turned into a commodity, selling its labor power to the capitalist class that owns the factories, businesses, and corporations. While ca...

Shane Dunphy was involved in social care for fifteen years. This book is a distillation of some of the cases he encountered in that time into a single, year-long narrative. In spite of the narrative's compression, and allowing for the necessary change of identifying details, everything in this book is true. And what the truth reveals! Here are the cases of three dysfunctional families, struggling at the margins of a society that barely acknowledges their existence. This is a portrait of fa...

Lady Ludlow is absolute mistress of Hanbury Court and a resolute opponent of anything that might disturb the class system into which she was born. She will keep no servant who can read and write and insists that the lower orders have no rights, but only duties. But the winds of change are blowing through the village of Hanbury. The vicar, Mr. Gray, wishes to start a Sunday school for religious reasons; Mr. Horner wants to educate the citizens for economic reasons. But Lady Ludlow is not as...

See how one militant union organizer fought the bosses—and national labor leaders—in this “breathtaking trip through the union-organizing scene” (Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed).“ . . . renews my faith that organizing works . . . makes a compelling case for a new vision for the American labor movement.” —Van JonesIn 1995, in the first contested election in the history of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney won the presidency ...

In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook draws upon three decades of wide-ranging research and thinking to make the persuasive assertion that almost all aspects of Western life have vastly improved in the past century--and yet today, most men and women feel less happy than in previous generations. Why this is so and what we should do about it is the subject of this book.Between contemporary emphasis on grievances and the fears engendered by 9/11, today it is comm...

We are said to be living in the age of entitlement. Scholars and pundits declare that millennials expect special treatment, do whatever they feel like, and think they deserve to have things handed to them. In The Myth of the Age of Entitlement, Cairns peels back the layers of the entitlement myth, exposing its faults and arguing that the majority of millennials are actually disentitled, facing bleak economic prospects and potential ecological disaster. Providing insights ...

The majority of American troops in Vietnam were not involved in the shooting war. They did have their issues however. Written over 30 years ago, this series of anecdotes takes you through two years in the life of one such soldier, from being drafted until after being discharged. From the Local Draft Boards to Nixon's War on Drugs, it's all here.

In One Nation, Two Cultures, one of today's most respected and articulate cultural critics gives us a penetrating examination of the gulf between the two sides of American society -- a divide that cuts across class, racial, ethnic, political, and sexual lines. While one side originated in the traditional idea of republican virtue, the other emerged from the counterculture of the late 1960s and has become the dominant culture of today.In clear and vigorous prose, Hi...

The old saying does often seem to hold true: the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, creating a widening gap between those who have more and those who have less. The sociologist Robert K. Merton called this phenomenon the Matthew effect, named after a passage in the gospel of Matthew. Yet the more closely we examine the sociological effects of this principle, the more complicated the idea becomes. Initial advantage doesn't always lead to further advantage, and disadvantage doesn't n...

This is the first comprehensive examination of Leon Trotsky's view on revolutionary organizational principles, and the dynamic interplay of democratic initiative and principled centralism. Mostly in his own words, these writings are grounded in Trotsky's experience in Russia's revolutionary movement, as a leader of the International Left Opposition and Fourth International.

Dick Houtman argues that neither authoritarianism nor libertarianism can be explained by class or economic background, but rather by position in the cultural domain-- what he calls cultural capital. Although he examines all of the statistics and arguments of the conventional approaches with care and concern, Houtman convincingly demonstrates that the conclusions drawn from earlier studies are untenable at a more general theoretical level. Despite differences among advocates of class explan...

The social sciences rely more on the comparative method than on experimental data mainly because the latter is difficult to acquire amongst human populations. The International Social Survey Programme has played a pioneering role in creating and sustaining methodologically-sophisticated mass attitude surveys across the globe. Starting in 1984 with five nations, it now encompasses forty-five nations spread over five continents, each administering an identical annual survey to a random sampl...