Union membership in the United States has fallen below 11 percent, the lowest rate since before the New Deal. Labor activist and scholar of the American labor movement Stanley Aronowitz argues that the movement as we have known it for the last 100 years is effectively dead. And he explains how this death has been a long time coming-the organizing and political principles adopted by US unions at mid-century have taken a terrible toll. In the 1950s, Aronowitz was a factory metalworker....

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire has been hailed as a latter day Communist Manifesto. Its ability to develop a theoretical framework relevant to the current period of global neo-liberalism and international capitalism captured the imagination of the growing anti-capitalist movement and has been claimed as a turning point for the left.As much as it has seduced and delighted some, however, it has enraged and frustrated others. In this collection, a serie...

Most accounts of the current financial crisis tell a story of deregulation, out-of-control markets and irresponsible speculation. But few of those works have done more than regurgitate the newspaper coverage. In contrast, The Great Credit Crash digs deeper, drawing on some of the most prominent radical analysts of the modern market to foreground the key questions that are still waiting to be answered.This volume presents a more complete and convincing analysis of the recent...

In our media-saturated culture, momentous events occur quickly, as news and images are broadcast around the country and the world. We are often riveted by the news and our everyday reality is suddenly changed. Yet, almost as quickly, that critical event is replaced by a new story. The old event fades from memory, and we move on to the next thing before understanding why it commanded our attention and how our world was changed.On April 16, 2007, such an event occurred on the Virgini...

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 ana...

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) was a pathbreaking intellectual who transformed the independent American Left in the 1940s and 1950s. Often challenging the established ideologies and approaches of fellow leftist thinkers, Mills was central to creating and developing the idea of the "public intellectual" in postwar America and laid the political foundations for the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. Written by Stanley Aronowitz, a leading sociologist and critic of American culture and politics,...

First Published in 2001. In this collection of essays and interviews, Mark Poster examines theoretical approaches and develops his own position on our information based society. He contends that new communications media disrupt and transfigure the way identities are constituted in cultural exchanges. He looks in detail at several aspects of what might be called "internet culture", including virtuality and democracy. Poster advocates an awareness of the Internet and other new forms of commu...

Building a new platform for change, prominent social critic Stanley Aronowitz diagnoses America's crisis of democracy and the dangers of the new authoritarianism. Aronowitz draws on his vast knowledge of history and political theory and from currents of political change around the globe, from the traditions of the European left to the newest political trends in Latin America that have challenged the "death of socialism. Demonstrating why Democrats lose when they cling to centrism and compr...

In Against Schooling, Stanley Aronowitz passionately raises an alarm about the current state of education in our country. Discipline and control over students, Aronowitz argues, are now the primary criteria of success, and genuine learning is sacrificed to a new educational militarism. In an age where school districts have imposed testing, teachers must teach to test, and both teacher and student are robbed of their autonomy and creativity. The crisis extends to higher education, where all...

The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism differentiates the "Social Justice Left" from "Cultural Radicalism" and the various social movements for individual freedom.In The Death and Rebirth of**American Radicalism, Stanley Aronowitz asks the question, "Is there anything left of the Left?" With the rise of Newt Gingrich and his "Contract With America," how is it that conservativism staged such a remarkable recovery after being discounted in the turbulent 1960s?...

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 ...

High technology will destroy more jobs than it creates. This grim prediction was first published in the 1994 edition of The Jobless Future, an eerily accurate title that could have been written for today's dismal economic climate. Fully updated and with a new introduction by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future warns that jobs as we know them-long-term, with benefits-are an endangered species.