| Stanley Aronowitz | |
| Birth Date: | 6 January 1933 |
| Birth Place: | New York City, New York, US |
| Death Place: | New York City, New York, US |
| Thesis Title: | Marxism, Technology and Labor[1] |
| Thesis Year: | 1975 |
| Doctoral Students: |
|
| Notable Students: | Immanuel Ness[2] |
Stanley Aronowitz (January 6, 1933 – August 16, 2021) was an American sociologist, trade union official, and political activist. A professor of sociology, cultural studies, and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center, his longtime political activism and cultural criticism was influential in the New Left movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. He was also an advocate for organized labor and a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society.[3] In 2012, Aronowitz was awarded the Center for Study of Working Class Life's Lifetime Achievement Award at Stony Brook University.
Born on January 6, 1933, 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.[4] [5] 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.
Aronowitz died on August 16, 2021, from complications of a stroke, in Manhattan.[6]
Aronowitz was the author of numerous books on class, culture, sociology of science, and politics. With Fredric Jameson and John Brenkman, he was 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).[7]
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."
In 2002, he was the Green Party of New York's nominee for governor. It was his first and only campaign for public office. He was just the second Green candidate for governor. Described as "The Anti-Candidate, Out To Anger The Rich" by the New York Times, he said of his campaign "My job is to start a public conversation, to show voters they have a choice and to get enough of a vote so we can stay on the ballot and speak out." In June 2002, his campaign had raised approximately $25,000 and was expected to raise just $150,000.[8] His campaign finished in 5th place, receiving 41,797 votes (.89%).
In 1965 Aronowitz was one of the lecturers at the Free University of New York shortly after it was founded.[9]
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.[10]
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.[11] [12]
Aronowitz lived in New York City. He was first married to Jane O'Connell until divorcing in 1962 and was then married to Ellen Willis from 1998 until her death in November 2006.[13] He had five children, including Nona Willis-Aronowitz.[14]
Aronowitz has authored, co-authored, or edited over 26 different books, as well as authored over 200 articles and reviews.[15]
| Title | Publication Date | Publisher | ISBN | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Against Orthodoxy: Social Theory and its Discontents | 2015 | |||
| The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers' Movement | 2014 | |||
| Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals | 2012 | |||
| Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters | 2008 | |||
| The Last Good Job in America: Work and Education in the New Global Technoculture | 2007 | |||
| Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future | 2006 | |||
| Just Around The Corner: The Paradox of the Jobless Recovery | 2005 | |||
| C. Wright Mills | 2004 | |||
| How Class Works: Power and Social Movement | 2004 | |||
| The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning | 2001 | |||
| From The Ashes Of The Old: American Labor and America's Future | 1998 | |||
| The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism | 1996 | |||
| Radical Democracy | 1994 | |||
| Dead Artists, Live Theories, and Other Cultural Problems | 1993 | |||
| Roll Over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife | 1993 | |||
| The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements | 1992 | |||
| Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society | 1988 | |||
| Working Class Hero : A New Strategy for Labor | 1983 | Adama Books | ||
| Crisis In Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Marxist Theory | 1981 | |||
| Food, Shelter, and the American Dream | 1974 | Seabury Press | ||
| False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness | 1973 | |||
| Honor America : The Nature of Fascism, Historic Struggles Against It and a Strategy for Today | 1970 | Times Change Press |
| Author(s) | Title | Publication Date | Publisher | ISBN | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work | 1995 | ||||
| Education Still Under Siege | 1993 | ||||
| Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism | 1991 | ||||
| Education Under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal and Radical Debate over Schooling | 1986 | ||||
| The Lesser Evil? Debates on the Democratic Party and Independent Working-Class Politics | 1977 |