Stanley Aronowitz

Stanley Aronowitz
Stanley Aronowitz by David Shankbone
Born	(1933-01-06) January 6, 1933[1] New York, New York
Nationality	American
Occupation	professor, editor, activist
Board member of	Advisory board of Social Text
Spouse(s)	Ellen Willis
Academic background
Education	Ph.D
Alma mater	Union Graduate School
Thesis title	Technology and Labor
Thesis year	1975
Influences	C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse[2]
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[3]
Notable students	Randy Martin

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.^[4] In 2012, Aronowitz was awarded the Center for Study of Working Class Life's Lifetime Achievement Award at Stony Brook University.^[2]

Biography

Early Life, Labor Organizing, & the Civil Rights Movement: 1933-1963

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. Subsequently, Aronowitz attended Brooklyn College before being suspended by the school's administration for engaging in a demonstration. Instead of returning to school the following year, Aronowitz moved to New Jersey in search of work where he would become employed in several metalworking factories. Aronowitz became involved in the American labor movement while in New Jersey, and in 1959, while laid off from his 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 lead into Aronowitz' appointment as director of the organizing and boycott department of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Aronowitz would spend the following 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. Aronowitz engaged in lunch counter sit-ins, as well as gave speeches on behalf of the labor movement to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee on the confluence of African-American civil rights and economic issues. Through his work in the civil rights movement, 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 1962-1963. 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 secure the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, United Packinghouse Workers of America, as well as rubber and clothing workers' unions.^[3]

Social Text

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).^[5] 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, Aronowitz cites 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

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. 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.^[6]

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^[7][8] drawing on the tradition of workers councils and adapting them to contemporary America.

Family

Aronowitz lives in New York City. He was married to Ellen Willis until her death in November 2006. He has five children.

Works

Books

• Honor America: The Nature of Fascism, Historic Struggles Against It and a Strategy for Today (1970)
• False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (1974; second edition 1992)
• "Food, shelter, and the American dream" (1974)
• The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Marxist Theory (1981)
• "Working Class Hero: A New Strategy for Labor" (1983)
• Education Under Siege (Critical Studies in Education and Culture) by Stanley Aronowitz, Henry A. Giroux (1985)
• Science As Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (1988)
• "Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism" by Stanley Aronowitz, Henry A. Giroux (1991)
• "The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements" (1992)
• "Dead Artists, Live Theories, and Other Cultural Problems" (1993)
• Roll over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife (1993)
• The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work by Stanley Aronowitz, William Difazio (1993, second edition 2010)
• "Technoscience and Cyberculture" Stanley Aronowitz (Co-Editor) with Barbara Martinsons, Michael Menser (1995)
• The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism (1996)
• Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation Stanley Aronowitz (Co-Editor) with Jonathan Cutler (1997) ISBN 0-415-91782-4
• "From The Ashes Of The Old: American Labor And America's Future" (1998)
• The Last Good Job in America (2001) ISBN 0-7425-0975-3
• The Knowledge Factory : Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (2001)
• Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century by Stanley Aronowitz (editor) (2002)
• Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered Stanley Aronowitz (Editor), Peter Bratsis (Editor) (2002) ISBN 0-8166-3294-4
• Debating Empire (New Left Review Debates) by Gopal Balakrishnan (editor), Stanley Aronowitz (editor) (2003)
• How Class Works : Power and Social Movement (2004)
• Just Around The Corner: The Paradox Of The Jobless Recovery (2005)
• Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006)
• Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters (The Radical Imagination) (2008)
• Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals (2012)
• "The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Worker's Movement" (2014)
• "Against Orthodoxy: Social Theory and its Discontents" (2015)

Articles

• "On Narcissism". TELOS 44 (Summer 1980). New York: Telos Press
• Aronowitz, Stanley (1993). Paulo Freire's radical democratic humanism. In P. McLaren & P. Leonard. (Eds.), Paulo Freire: A critical encounter (pp. 9-)
• "Setting the Record Straight: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Critics", Logos, issue 3.3 (summer 2004).

References

External links

• Official website
• A review of Aronowitz's The Jobless Future, with Aronowitz's response
• Library of Congress Stanley Aronowitz Election 2002 Web Archive
• A Mills Revival? by Stanley Aronowitz
• Setting the Record Straight: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Critics by Stanley Aronowitz
• The Democrats Desperately Seeking Defeat by Stanley Aronowitz
• On the AFL-CIO Split by Stanley Aronowitz
• Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination