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 studiesBrings together more than 50 selections rich in theory and empirical detail that span the working, middle, and capitalist classesAnalyzes class within the larger context of labor, particularly as it relates to conflicts over and about workProvides 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
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, includingThe 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); andHow Class Works (2003).
MICHAEL JAMES ROBERTS is Associate Professor of Sociology at San Diego State University, USA. He is the author ofTell 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 journalsCritical Sociology, Race& Class, Rethinking Marxism, Mobilization, Popular Music, andThe Sociological Quarterly.
General Introduction vii
How to Read This Book xvii
Part One The Working Class
1 Representing the Working Class 3
Michael J. Roberts
2 The Realm of Freedom and The Magna Carta of the Legally Limited Working Day 23
Karl Marx
3 Time, WorkDiscipline, and Industrial Capitalism 27
E. P. Thompson
4 The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class 41
David R. Roediger
5 A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society 57
Lawrence B. Glickman
6 The Stop Watch and The Wooden Shoe: Scientific Management and the Industrial Workers of the World 69
Mike Davis
7 The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community 79
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James
8 Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 87
Nan Enstad
9 Three Strikes That Paved the Way 103
Art Preis
10 Jukebox Blowin a Fuse: The WorkingClass Roots of RockandRoll 111
Michael J. Roberts
11 Labors Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism 125
Jonathan Cutler
12 The Unmaking of the English Working Class: Deindustrialization, Reification, and Heavy Metal 141
Ryan M. Moore
13 The Jobless Future: SciTech and the Dogma of Work 151
Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio
14 Shiftless of the World Unite! 165
Robin D.G. Kelley
15 Occupy the Hammock: The Sign of the Slacker behind Disturbances in the Will to Work 171
Michael J. Roberts
Part Two The Middle Class
16 The Vanishing Middle 193
Stanley Aronowitz
17 The Struggle Over the Saloon 205
Roy Rosenzweig
18 The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany 221
Siegfried Kracauer
19 The Twilight of the Middle Class: PostWorld War II American Fiction and WhiteCollar Work 229
Andrew Hoberek
20 The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis 263
Magali Sarfatti Larson
21 The New Working Class 287
Serge Mallet
22 How the University Works: Higher Education and the LowWage Nation 299
Marc Bousquet
23 The Mental Labor Problem 315
Andrew Ross
24 Neoliberalism, Debt and Class Power 337
Justin Sean Myers
Part Three The Capitalist Class
25 The Capitalist Class: Accumulation, Crisis and Discipline 353
Michael J. Roberts
26 The Secret of Primitive Accumulation 383
Karl Marx
27 The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 18501896 393
Sven Beckert
28 Class Struggle and the New Deal: Industrial Labor, Industrial Capital, and the State 413
Rhonda F. Levine
29 Scientific Management 437
Harry Braverman
30 Labor and Franklin Delano Roosevelts New Dream 449
Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt
31 Nixons Class Struggle 467
Jefferson Cowie
32 The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism 485
John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney
33 The End of Retirement 503
Teresa Ghilarducci
34 The Politics of Austerity and the Ikarian Dream 513
Kristin Lawler
Selected Bibliography 519
Index 523
