Using an innovative framework, this reader examines the most important and influential writings on modern class relations.
Uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines scholarship from political economy, social history, and cultural studies
Brings together more than 50 selections rich in theory and empirical detail that span the working, middle, and capitalist classes
Analyzes class within the larger context of labor, particularly as it relates to conflicts over and about work
Provides insight into the current crisis in the global capitalist system, including the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the explosion of Arab Spring, and the emergence of class conflict in China
2 The Realm of Freedom and The Magna Carta of the Legally Limited Working Day 23
3 Time, Work–Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism 27
4 The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class 41
5 A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society 57
6 The Stop Watch and The Wooden Shoe: Scientific Management and the Industrial Workers of the World 69
7 The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community 79
8 Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 87
9 Three Strikes That Paved the Way 103
10 Jukebox Blowin a Fuse: The Working–Class Roots of Rock–and–Roll 111
11 Labor s Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism 125
12 The Unmaking of the English Working Class: Deindustrialization, Reification, and Heavy Metal 141
13 The Jobless Future: Sci–Tech and the Dogma of Work 151
14 Shiftless of the World Unite! 165
15 Occupy the Hammock: The Sign of the Slacker behind Disturbances in the Will to Work 171
Part Two The Middle Class
16 The Vanishing Middle 193
17 The Struggle Over the Saloon 205
18 The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany 221
19 The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post–World War II American Fiction and White–Collar Work 229
20 The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis 263
21 The New Working Class 287
22 How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low–Wage Nation 299
23 The Mental Labor Problem 315
24 Neoliberalism, Debt and Class Power 337
Part Three The Capitalist Class
25 The Capitalist Class: Accumulation, Crisis and Discipline 353
26 The Secret of Primitive Accumulation 383
27 The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850 1896 393
28 Class Struggle and the New Deal: Industrial Labor, Industrial Capital, and the State 413
29 Scientific Management 437
30 Labor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt s New Dream 449
31 Nixon s Class Struggle 467
32 The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism 485
33 The End of Retirement 503
34 The Politics of Austerity and the Ikarian Dream 513
Selected Bibliography 519
Index 523
STANLEY ARONOWITZ is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. He is also Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology, and Work at the Graduate Center. He is the author of twenty–five books, including The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Worker′s Movement (2014); Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals (2012); Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters (2008); Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006); and How Class Works (2003).
MICHAEL JAMES ROBERTS is Associate Professor of Sociology at San Diego State University, USA. He is the author of Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock′n′Roll, the Labor Question and the Musicians′ Union 1942–1968 (2014), which was nominated for the annual Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book by the American Sociological Association′s section on culture. His work has also been published in the journals Critical Sociology, Race & Class, Rethinking Marxism, Mobilization, Popular Music, and The Sociological Quarterly.
Using an innovative framework, Class: The Anthology examines the most important and influential writings on modern class relations. It brings together more than 30 selections rich in theory and empirical detail that span the working, middle, and capitalist classes.
The editors use an interdisciplinary approach that combines scholarship from political economy, social history, and cultural studies. By bridging these three distinct traditions, they position the question of class within the larger theoretical framework of work and labor. The selections address the major historical events and developments within class relations in the US and also internationally. They illuminate important insights about the relationship between workers and capitalism, as well as key issues at the intersection of class, race, and gender. This new conception of class allows readers to make sense of modern class relations as well as the current crisis in the global capitalist system, from the Occupy Wall Street Movement to the explosion of Arab Spring and the emergence of class conflict in China.