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
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, Work‐Discipline, 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 Working‐Class Roots of Rock‐and‐Roll 111 Michael J. Roberts 11 Labor’s 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: Sci‐Tech 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: Post‐World War II American Fiction and White‐Collar 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 Low‐Wage 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, 1850–1896 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 Roosevelt’s New Dream 449 Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt 31 Nixon’s 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
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.
