[ Stanley Aronowitz died this week at 88. He hated work, loved
life, and brought his overflowing, exuberant approach to social
problems to picket lines, classrooms, and vacation. A fighting left
needs more people like him.] [[link removed]]

STANLEY ARONOWITZ KNEW THAT FREEDOM BEGINS WHERE WORK ENDS  
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Jamie McCallum
August 18, 2021
Jacobin

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_ Stanley Aronowitz died this week at 88. He hated work, loved life,
and brought his overflowing, exuberant approach to social problems to
picket lines, classrooms, and vacation. A fighting left needs more
people like him. _

Stanley Aronowitz was a distinguished scholar of labor, work, unions,
class, education, American politics, and Marxism. , (David Shankbone /
Wikimedia Commons)

 

In the summer of 2004, as a young graduate student, I emailed Stanley
Aronowitz
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for a meeting to discuss an idea for my doctoral dissertation. He
replied that there are three reasons to be a professor: June, July,
and August. He asked me, politely, to write him again in September.

That was the moment I realized I wanted to be a college professor,
which eventually, by incalculable strokes of luck years later, I
became — much to Stanley’s dismay.

Stanley had what he called “the last good job in America,” the
college professor. It provided reasonable income and autonomy at work,
a degree of free expression. He had a union, of which he was a leader,
and he loved the job much of the time.

Yet in the essay
[[link removed]] “The Last Good Job in
America” that eventually became a book
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he stakes out what I take to be the abiding concern of his entire
intellectual career. Written in diary form, near the beginning, he
faux-complains about caring for his sick daughter, Nona — he had to
“minister to the puking” — which interrupted his workday. It is
a day which, when he finally gets around to laying it out, sounds
downright leisurely by today’s standards. “Except for the
requirement that I teach or preside at one or two classes and seminars
a week and direct at least five dissertations at a time, I pretty much
control my paid worktime,” he writes.

Stanley was a distinguished scholar of labor, work, unions, class,
education, American politics, and Marxism. What sewed these issues
together for him was a concern over our collective control of time,
time which is so central to our individual concerns of daily life as
well as human destiny as a whole under capitalism. He felt that labor
unions had surrendered the fight for shorter hours, forfeited their
original mission, and were, as a result, doomed to bargaining —
“collective begging” he always put it — over a narrow slice of
bread-and-butter issues.

Stanley came from the trade union movement. At times, he seemed to be
at the center of things, as when he was appointed by Bayard Rustin
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coordinate labor support for the March on Washington. By his own
account, though, he was a persistent thorn in the side of union
officialdom. As an organizer and a proud shit-starter for the Oil,
Chemical and Atomic Workers union in north New Jersey, he was
“exiled” to Puerto Rico by union leadership where, thankfully, he
finally had time to reflect.

When he eventually returned to the states, his experience as a
unionist and a voracious reader of history and social theory
transformed into a coherent critique of work — including what he saw
as work’s apologists, the unions themselves — in _False Promises:
The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness_. Part critique of
the postwar labor movement, part reflection of the Western Marxism of
the Frankfurt school, it is the most wide-ranging exploration of
working-class consciousness I’ve ever read.

In it, he lays the foundation of his concern with the classed nature
of “leisure or unbounded time.” “The distinctions between the
private and public realm that constitute the real basis for the
cultural autonomy of the working class are constantly being
undermined,” he wrote. “Yet the resistance to such invasion is the
fundamental condition for the development of a working class movement
capable of charting its own historical course.”

Eventually, he landed a full-time teaching gig at the City University
of New York (CUNY) in sociology — a discipline he, incidentally,
always distanced himself from. Stanley hated the taxonomy of the
social sciences, insisting the boundaries were arbitrary, rigid, and
mostly for professionals rather than genuine advancement of social
phenomena.

Somewhere, sometime, someone will write a full reflection on his
life’s work. They will wade into _The Crisis in Historical
Materialism_, an underappreciated reconsideration of Marx in light of
the demands of the New Left. What many argued were strategic blind
spots of the old union left — the ignorance of “merely cultural”
demands for gender, racial, and sexual justice — Stanley saw as
cause to rewrite Marx’s seminal argument about the force that served
as the engine of historical change. In Stanley’s mind, it wasn’t
that Marx was incorrect about the central role of class struggle; it
was that Stanley’s definition of what constituted class struggle was
far broader than the old man’s.

It was a theme he revisited in _How Class Works_ in 2003, the year I
met him, in which he argued for the “sundering the traditional
sociological distinction between class and social movement.” Genuine
social movements — struggles to “overcome divisions between black
and white, native and foreign, men and women, to create a workers’
movement independent of capital” — were, in his telling,
synonymous with class formation.

Future Stanley historians will also have to contend with his careful
analysis of the role of technology in the workplace, as he elaborated
in _The Jobless Future _(coauthored with his good friend William
DiFazio), and notably in a coauthored book chapter called “The
Post-Work Manifesto.” Stanley was less recognized as a scholar of
education, though it didn’t stop him from writing two books on the
topic, _The Knowledge Factory _and_ Against Schooling. _I long
wondered why he never wrote something extensive about sexuality. He
often grappled with the topic when dealing with social theory and
labor, and saw much value in studying the libidinal and erotic theory
of Freud and Reich in working-class studies.

And then there was that time in 2002 he ran for governor of New York
as a Green. George Pataki won the race, but Stanley finished a
respectable fifth with 41,797 votes — nearly three times as many, it
should be noted, as Andrew Cuomo.

Seizing the Essence of Everyday Life

I went to study sociology at CUNY because I had read _False
Promises_ while working for a labor union. As a professor, he
vacillated between close readings of the texts and of no readings of
them at all. His classes sparkled either way. A good teacher imparts
knowledge; a great one inspires you to ask better questions. My time
studying with him was a high point of my intellectual life.

Stanley was one of the most charming men I’ve ever met, with a
brutal wit, an impossible smile, and guileless eyes — even when he
was giving you shit. He was the first person to tell me, casually
without prompt, that my hairline was receding. During the oral exam
period of my graduate study, for which he was a main evaluator, he
made a money bet with me that my analysis of Antonio Gramsci was
substantively worse than his. (He later graciously declined to accept
my payment of $20 when a fellow graduate student confirmed he was
“more right.”)

When I informed him of my intent to accept a job as a professor, he
warned me to turn it down. “They’ll never give you a moment’s
rest to think,” he said. The last good job in America, turns out,
wasn’t good enough for him anymore. (I took the job, not his
advice).

I got closer with Stanley after I joined the Board of Directors of the
Left Forum, which he cofounded. Left Forum was a new version of the
Socialist Scholars Conference, an annual gathering of the US and
international left. I was brought on to help bring younger people of
different political tendencies into the fold. As an aspiring
intellectual, I sat around tables with Frances Fox Piven, Bill Tabb,
Rod Bush, Nancy Holmstrom, Stanley, and many other luminaries who made
up our organizing crew. I felt like I had been selected for an
all-star team without ever having competed in a game.

Stanley seemed almost uninterested in the conference panels we put
together on labor and work topics, even if he was on them. By
contrast, he championed our forays into cultural studies, or, as he
liked to call it, “the essence of everyday life.” We prioritized
panels on art, medicine, sports, and even once convened our own
classical music concert.

Stanley’s preoccupation with art, music, and movies — always
“movies,” never something as pretentious as “cinema” — was
explored at times in his formal scholarship and served as a background
condition to all his work on critical theory, labor, and unions. He
thought the trade union movement had lost sight of their role in
transforming the quotidian experiences of everyday life. The simple
fact of automatic dues deduction meant that union organizers no longer
collected membership fees face to face, a symbol to Stanley of a
larger break between workers and their organizations.

He never missed an opportunity to denounce the Wagner Act, often
considered the height of the New Deal’s labor victories, as the law
that pacified class struggle unionism. It did so, as he wrote
in _False Promises_, by formalizing the union as a state-sponsored
administrator of formal rights rather than as an organic expression of
working-class aspirations. To him, this compromise was not only a
strategic dead end in the long run — it was one more betrayal.

He chose this old classic labor hymn for the epigraph of his book:

The cloakmakers’ union is a no-good union,

It’s a company union by the bosses.

The old cloakmakers and the Socialist fakers

By the workers are making double crosses.

The Dubinskys, the Hillquits, the Thomases

By the workers are making false promises,

They preach socialism but they practice fascism

To save capitalism by the bosses.

Where Freedom Begins

To know Stanley, to love him, was to argue with him. I ended up
resigning from the Left Forum Board, along with a few other folks, but
Stanley stayed on. We all took it personally. Then just two years ago,
Stanley agreed to meet me — in the summer! I was visiting New York
City and wanted to pick his brain about a book I was writing on labor
time.

We met at 9 AM for breakfast at one of his favorite delis in Queens. I
ordered a coffee and a donut. He ordered eggplant parmesan and a large
Coke — “because of the free refills,” he said, smiling.

At our meeting, he continually returned to a passage of Marx’s which
he had memorized like scripture: “The realm of freedom actually
begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane
considerations ceases… the true realm of freedom, which, however,
can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The
shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”

This time, I took his advice. I ended my book by reflecting on this
passage. The point, Stanley thought, was not simply to abolish work,
but to redefine the realm of necessity so that it included all the
good things of life — like lots and lots of free time.

Stanley had no “mundane considerations.” His books, lectures,
speeches, even breakfast chats, were full of life. He burst into song
in class and at meetings, was always the loudest person in the room,
and, for better or worse, talked openly about intimate details of his
life to virtual strangers. He put the “vulgar” back in “vulgar
Marxism,” he once told me.

A fighting left needs more people like him: a fierce critic from the
inside, a lovable opponent, who’s as comfortable in a classroom as
on a picket line. As many workers as he brought into the unions, he
brought students into the academy and activists into the Left. It
would be impossible to live up to his grandeur. But to honor his
legacy we should try, anyway.

_Jamie McCallum is associate professor of sociology at Middlebury
College and the author, most recently, of Worked Over: How
Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream
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