Aronowitz, Stanley. How Class Works: Power and Social Movement

International Social Science Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Arvid J. Carlson

Aronowitz, Stanley. How Class Works: Power and Social Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. vii 263 pp. Cloth, $29.95; paper, $17.00.

Whatever happened to Marxism in America? Did the United States ever have a truly classless society? These are implicit questions that Stanley Aronowitz, Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, sets out to explore in How Class Works. His efforts are directed toward redefining the Left or, more precisely, to identify the "new social activists" operating largely outside the American labor movement, the latter of which he believes has failed its membership. Completed in eight rather dense chapters, Aronowitz nonetheless employs a good turn of phrase and writes at a level that serious students of the social sciences should appreciate.

Aronowitz's real argument is with the American labor unions' refusal to become a true social movement (Chapter 2). Along the way, nonetheless, he provides an excellent review of labor history and its struggle with "Fordism" (Chapter 3). The thrust of his argument suggests that the American proletariat lost its own autonomy as unions were co-opted by FDR and the New Deal.

Chapter 4 promises a new "class map" which turns out to be the "status groups" of blacks, women, gays, and the disabled, with each group providing its own agenda to constantly shifting "cultural alliances" (read classes). These shifting alliances have changed American politics (organized, the author argues, by "capitalistic logic") with little reflection in the two congressional parties. Aronowitz's cast of villains is the bureaucratic labor leaders in the United States, and he singles out Walter Reuther for having used labor's power allied with capitalism to solve social problems. However, those of us who watched "the Battle of the Underpass" in Dearborn, MI, during the 1930s when Ford's hired police crushed strikers might have difficulty with such characterization of the Reuther brothers.

On the positive side, Chapter 5 details the rise of globalization and the burgeoning alliance of fractions of the world's labor movement (without U.S. involvement) along with students protesting sweatshop conditions and "battered" detachments of environmentalists who appear constrained by the inability of nation-states to forge resistance to global threats. Here "globalization" of the free market (which I deem an oxymoron) has resulted in a parallel resistance movement beyond the nation willing to seek results through "direct action" as demonstrated in Seattle, Paris, or Genoa.

The description of the latter "New Social Movements and Class" (Chapter 6) is the most interesting part of the book as the author seeks to define "new class movements" which also receive new impetus from "biopolitics" of the environmental movement. Here, Aronowitz has his own New York ax to grind against the heavy-handed slum clearance methods of Robert Moses which leads to an interesting discussion of the "rational" (read destructive) versus the "natural" method of living which the author gleans from Hegel.

The book, published in 2003, brings its readers up-to-date with extensive footnotes and a somewhat apocalyptic tone of future hope for the emergence of new social activists (Chapter 8) who will breathe new life into the exhausted Left. Aronowitz's arguments here against the nation-state ought to be best applied to the experiment of the European Union with its Committees on Economic and Social Policy and Local Regions. And yet, in denial of Aronowitz, minority parties such as the Greens have opted instead to embark on modest reforms as opposed to the direct action once urged by the Marxists.

Arvid J. Carlson, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus of History

Austin College

Sherman, Texas