False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class ConsciousnessThis classic study of the American working class, originally published in 1973, is now back in print with a new introduction and epilogue by the author. An innovative blend of first-person experience and original scholarship, Aronowitz traces the historical development of the American working class from post-Civil War times and shows why radical movements have failed to overcome the forces that tend to divde groups of workers from one another. The rise of labor unions is analyzed, as well as their decline as a force for social change. Aronowitz’s new introduction situates the book in the context of developments in current scholarship and the epilogue discusses the effects of recent economic and political changes in the American labor movement. |
Contents
Lordstown Disruption on the Assembly Line | 21 |
Colonized Leisure Trivialized Work | 51 |
Formation of the Industrial Working Class | 137 |
Trade Unionism Illusion and Reality | 214 |
The Formation of the Professional Servant Class | 264 |
The WhiteCollar Proletarians | 291 |
The Unsilent Fifties | 323 |
Epilogue | 395 |
| 445 | |
| 449 | |
Other editions - View all
False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness Stanley Aronowitz Limited preview - 1991 |
Common terms and phrases
activity administration AFL-CIO American auto became become Black workers bureaucracy capitalism capitalist century class consciousness collective bargaining Communist consciousness constituted contract corporations craft craft unions decade demands democratic division of labor domination E. P. Thompson early economic employers ethnic European factory film forms groups Herbert Marcuse hierarchy ideologies immigrants important industrial unions institutions issues labor force labor movement labor power large number leadership Lordstown machine major membership ment militancy mills nomic occupations operations organization Party percent plant play political position production professional radical rank-and-file relations remained represented revolutionary rise role sector semiskilled skilled workers social Socialist society Southern steel Steelworkers strike structure struggle technological textile tion trade union union leaders United unskilled wages white-collar wildcat strikes women York young
Popular passages
Page xliv - JGA Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and "Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972): 119-34.
Page xxx - But tell me whether or not, occupying the position we do, private conscience should not yield to that imperial one formulated in the code under which alone we officially proceed?