Stanley Aronowitz
Stanley Aronowitz | |
---|---|
Born | [6] New York City, New York, U.S. | January 6, 1933
Occupation(s) | Professor, editor, activist |
Title | Distinguished Professor[7] |
Spouse | Ellen Willis |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Union Graduate School (Ph.D., 1975) The New School (B.A., 1968) Brooklyn College (1950)[1] |
Thesis | Technology and Labor (1975) |
Influences | C. Wright Mills,[2] Herbert Marcuse[3] |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Sociologist, Cultural critic |
Sub-discipline | Labor unions in the United States, Education, Technology, Science Studies |
Institutions | University of California at Irvine, Columbia University, City University of New York[4] |
Doctoral students | Randy Martin, Suzanna Danuta Walters, Cornel West[citation needed] |
Notable students | Immanuel Ness[5] |
Stanley Aronowitz (born January 6, 1933) is a professor of sociology, cultural studies, and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also a veteran political activist and cultural critic, an advocate for organized labor and a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society.[8] In 2012, Aronowitz was awarded the Center for Study of Working Class Life's Lifetime Achievement Award at Stony Brook University.[2]
Biography
Born and raised in New York City, Aronowitz attended public primary school in The Bronx before enrolling in The High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. He then attended Brooklyn College until being suspended by its administration for engaging in a demonstration. Instead of returning to school the next year, Aronowitz moved to New Jersey, where he worked at several metalworking factories.
Aronowitz became involved in the American labor movement in New Jersey, and in 1959, while laid off from his job as a metalworker, he found work with the New Jersey Industrial Union Council. Collaborating with the council's president, Aronowitz cowrote New Jersey's unemployment compensation law, subsequently enacted by the state legislature in 1961.
His work with the Industrial Union Council led to Aronowitz's appointment as director of the organizing and boycott department of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Aronowitz spent four years traveling throughout the United States to develop the union's campaigns.
In the 1960s, while employed with the Clothing Workers, Aronowitz began participating in the Civil Rights Movement. He engaged in lunch counter sit-ins and gave speeches on the labor movement's behalf to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee on the confluence of African-American civil rights and economic issues.
Through his work in civil rights, Aronowitz secured the role of labor coordinator, appointed by Bayard Rustin, on the planning committee of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1962-3. Aronowitz was tasked with soliciting the support of American labor unions for the march, and while encountering resistance from the majority of trade unions, most notably the AFL-CIO, he secured the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, United Packinghouse Workers of America, as well as rubber and clothing workers' unions.[4]
Writings
Aronowitz is the author of numerous books on class, culture, sociology of science, and politics. With Fredric Jameson and John Brenkman, he is a founding editor of Duke University's Social Text, a journal that is subtitled "Theory, Culture, Ideology." He defended the journal from criticism after it published a hoax article in its Summer 1996 issue (see Sokal Affair).[9]
In that article, he stated that with this publication, "Our objective was to interrogate Marxists' habitual separation of political economy and culture and to make a contribution to their articulation, even reunification." Aronowitz, however, was not a working editor at the time of the Sokal scandal and had not seen the paper before publication. In an interview in the Brooklyn Rail after the publication of Taking it Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals, he cited Mills's influence on his beliefs when he states, "My own insights, as a result of my own experience as a worker, as a trade unionist, and as an activist, were stimulated and, to some extent, guided by Mills’s example. His three major books on American social structure—The New Men of Power, White Collar, and The Power Elite—together constitute a compelling intellectual program for our own times."[2]
Green politics
This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources. (September 2017) |
In 2002, Aronowitz led efforts to maintain the official ballot status of the Green Party in New York and ran for governor on that ticket the same year. He ran a grass roots campaign based on a radical democratic program that combined opposition to corporate power and plutocratic government with commitment to sustainability, racial equality, feminism, gay liberation and individual freedom.[citation needed]
His campaign finished in 5th place, receiving 41,797 votes (.89%). He is also an active trade unionist and a member of the executive council of his university's union, the Professional Staff Congress, AFT. Aronowitz is a proponent of a reduced work week, among other strategies for improving everyday life, and works actively with the Basic Income Earth Network toward the furtherance of such goals.
Other activities
In 1965 Aronowitz was one of the lecturers at the Free University of New York shortly after it was founded.[10]
In 1976, Aronowitz (then living in San Diego and teaching at UC-Irvine, joined the New American Movement. In 2010, he would write a lengthy essay titled, "The New American Movement and Why It Failed" for the journal Work and Days.[11]
In 2005 Aronowitz co-founded the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. He has also published articles in numerous publications and with a core group of intellectuals—faculty and students—at the Graduate Center, he spearheaded the effort to create the Center for Cultural Studies (now the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work) in the spirit of fostering intellectual debate, multidisciplinarity, and the toppling of high cultural privilege in academia. In 1969, Aronowitz, Jeremy Brecher, Paul Mattick Jr., and Peter Rachleff, began sporadically publishing a magazine and pamphlet series called Root & Branch[12][13] drawing on the tradition of workers councils and adapting them to contemporary America.[citation needed]
Family
Aronowitz lives in New York City. He was married to Ellen Willis until her death in November 2006. He has five children,[citation needed] including Nona Willis-Aronowitz.[14]
Works
Aronowitz has authored, co-authored, or edited over 26 different books, as well as authored over 200 articles and reviews.[7]
Solely Authored Books
Title | Publication Date | Publisher | ISBN |
---|---|---|---|
Against Orthodoxy: Social Theory and its Discontents | 2015 | Palgrave Macmillan | ISBN 1137438878 |
The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers' Movement | 2014 | Verso Books | ISBN 1784783005 |
Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals | 2012 | Columbia University Press | ISBN 0231135408 |
Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters | 2008 | Routledge | ISBN 1594515034 |
The Last Good Job in America: Work and Education in the New Global Technoculture | 2007 | Rowman & Littlefield | ISBN 0742560260 |
Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future | 2006 | Routledge | ISBN 1594513112 |
Just Around The Corner: The Paradox of the Jobless Recovery | 2005 | Temple University Press | ISBN 1592131387 |
C. Wright Mills | 2004 | Sage Publications | ISBN 0761973710 |
How Class Works: Power and Social Movement | 2004 | Yale University Press | ISBN 0300105045 |
The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning | 2001 | Beacon Press | ISBN 0807031232 |
From The Ashes Of The Old: American Labor and America's Future | 1998 | Basic Books | ISBN 0465004091 |
The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism | 1996 | Routledge | ISBN 0415912415 |
Radical Democracy | 1994 | Blackwell | ISBN 1557865469 |
Dead Artists, Live Theories, and Other Cultural Problems | 1993 | Routledge | ISBN 0415907381 |
Roll Over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife | 1993 | Wesleyan University Press | ISBN 0819552550 |
The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements | 1992 | Routledge | ISBN 0415904366 |
Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society | 1988 | Palgrave Macmillan | ISBN 0816616590 |
Working Class Hero : A New Strategy for Labor | 1983 | Adama Books | ISBN 0915361132 |
Crisis In Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Marxist Theory | 1981 | Praeger Publishers | ISBN 0897890116 |
Food, Shelter, and the American Dream | 1974 | Seabury Press | ISBN 082640104X |
False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness | 1973 | McGraw-Hill Education | ISBN 0822311984 |
Honor America : The Nature of Fascism, Historic Struggles Against It and a Strategy for Today | 1970 | Times Change Press | ISBN 0878100113 |
Coauthored Books
Author(s) | Title | Publication Date | Publisher | ISBN |
---|---|---|---|---|
Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio | Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work | 1995 | University of Minnesota Press | ISBN 0816621942 |
Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux | Education Still Under Siege | 1993 | Bergin & Garvey | ISBN 0897893115 |
Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux | Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism | 1991 | University of Minnesota Press | ISBN 0816618801 |
Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux | Education Under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal and Radical Debate over Schooling | 1986 | Routledge | ISBN 0710213182 |
Jack Barnes, Stanley Aronowitz, Peter Camejo, Michael Harrington, George Breitman, and Carl Haessler | The Lesser Evil? Debates on the Democratic Party and Independent Working-Class Politics | 1977 | Pathfinder Press | ISBN 0873485181 |
References
- ^ Aronowitz, Stanley (October 15, 2014). "A 'Post-Political' Labor Movement". In These Times (Interview). Interviewed by David Moberg. Chicago: In These Times and the Institute for Public Affairs. Retrieved December 19, 2016.
- ^ a b c Aronowitz, Stanley (August 1, 2012). "InConversation STANLEY ARONOWITZ with Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker". Express (Interview). Interviewed by Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker. Brooklyn, NY: The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved August 29, 2016.
- ^ Ward, Tony (May 8, 2013). "Stanley Aronowitz". Tony Ward Education. Retrieved December 8, 2016.
[Stanley] was deeply influenced by Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation and One-Dimensional Man and in 1972-3 he met Marcuse who had responded to the manuscript for his first book, the acclaimed False Promises: The Shaping of American Working-Class Consciousness.
- ^ a b Aronowitz, Stanley (2016). "Biography". StanleyAronowitz.org. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved August 25, 2016.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ Ness, Immanuel (1995). Trade unions and the unemployed: Organizing strategies, conflict, and control (Ph.D.). Graduate Center, CUNY. p. iii. OCLC 1043905373. ProQuest 304187945.
- ^ Staff. "Stanley Aronowitz: LC Authority Name File". Library of Congress. Retrieved August 29, 2016.
- ^ a b Staff. "Stanley Aronowitz". Faculty - Core Bios. Graduate Center, CUNY. Retrieved May 30, 2017.
- ^ "International Organization for a Participatory Society: Consultative Committee". International Organization for a Participatory Society. Retrieved April 23, 2012.
- ^ Aronowitz, S. (1997) Alan Sokal's "Transgression". Dissent, Winter 1997.
- ^ Berke, Joseph (October 29, 1965), "The Free University of New York", Peace News: 6–7 as reproduced in Jakobsen, Jakob (2012), Anti-University of Londin–Antihistory Tabloid, London, UK: MayDay Rooms, pp. 6–7, archived from the original on 2012-10-12
- ^ Aronowitz, Stanley. "The New American Movement and Why It Failed." Work and Day Issue 55/56; Vol. 28, 2010; pp. 21-34
- ^ "Root & Branch: A Liberatarian Socialist Journal". 1973. Retrieved April 16, 2015.
- ^ Root & Branch: The Rise of the Workers' Movements. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. 1975.
- ^ "Willis, Ellen. Papers of Ellen Willis, 1941-2011: A Finding Aid". Oasis.lib.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2017-04-28.
External links
- 1933 births
- Living people
- Jewish American writers
- American political writers
- American male non-fiction writers
- American sociologists
- New York (state) Greens
- Graduate Center, CUNY faculty
- Labor historians
- Duke University faculty
- American Marxists
- American anti–nuclear power activists
- American democracy activists
- American environmentalists
- Consumer rights activists
- Jewish activists
- Jewish socialists
- The High School of Music & Art alumni
- CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies faculty
- New American Movement