Can the Working Class Change the World?

Can the Working Class Change the World? PDF

Author: Michael D. Yates

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1583677127

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One of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But, as Karl Marx points out, it is the fact of being paid for one's work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce” – where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals” – lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They've organized unions, struck, picketed, boycotted, formed political organizations and parties – sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But, Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of creating that change. In his timely and innovative book, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can, indeed, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work, itself, Yates asks if there can, in fact, be a thing called the working class? If so, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, location – to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions, Yates supports his arguments with relevant, clearly explained data, historical examples, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class, and what all of us might do to change the world.

The Theory of the Leisure Class

The Theory of the Leisure Class PDF

Author: Thorstein Veblen

Publisher:

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13:

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The Theory of the Leisure Class is a book on economics and sociology by Thorstein Veblen, giving a detailed critique of conspicuous consumption (the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display the economic power of the income). First published in 1899, Veblen argues that the upper classes and the elite partake in conspicuous consumption and do nothing to contribute to the economy or to the production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society - instead it is the middle class and the working class that support the whole of society.

The Theory of the Leisure Class

The Theory of the Leisure Class PDF

Author: Thorstein Veblen

Publisher:

Published: 2021-04-15

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13:

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"The Theory of the Leisure Class is a book on economics and sociology by Thorstein Veblen, giving a detailed critique of conspicuous consumption (the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display the economic power of the income). First published in 1899, Veblen argues that the upper classes and the elite partake in conspicuous consumption and do nothing to contribute to the economy or to the production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society - instead it is the middle class and the working class that support the whole of society."

The Working Class Majority

The Working Class Majority PDF

Author: Michael Zweig

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-11-22

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0801464781

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In the second edition of his essential book—which incorporates vital new information and new material on immigration, race, gender, and the social crisis following 2008—Michael Zweig warns that by allowing the working class to disappear into categories of "middle class" or "consumers," we also allow those with the dominant power, capitalists, to vanish among the rich. Economic relations then appear as comparisons of income or lifestyle rather than as what they truly are—contests of power, at work and in the larger society.

A/moral Economics

A/moral Economics PDF

Author: Claudia C. Klaver

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780814209448

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A/Moral Economics is an interdisciplinary historical study that examines the ways which social "science" of economics emerged through the discourse of the literary, namely the dominant moral and fictional narrative genres of early and mid-Victorian England. In particular, this book argues that the classical economic theory of early-nineteenth-century England gained its broad cultural authority not directly, through the well- known texts of such canonical economic theorists as David Ricardo, but indirectly through the narratives constructed by Ricardo's popularizers John Ramsey McCulloch and Harriet Martineau. By reexamining the rhetorical and institutional contexts of classical political economy in the nineteenth century, A/Moral Economics repositions the popular writings of both supporters and detractors of political economy as central to early political economists' bids for a cultural voice. The now marginalized economic writings of McCulloch, Martineau, Henry Mayhew, and John Ruskin, as well as the texts of Charles Dickens and J. S. Mill, must be read as constituting in part the entities they have been read as merely criticizing. It is this repressed moral logic that resurfaces in a range of textual contradictions--not only in the writings of Ricardo's supporters, but, ironically, in those of his critics as well.

Skilled Workers in the Class Structure

Skilled Workers in the Class Structure PDF

Author: Roger Penn

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0521254558

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Based on an investigation of trade union structures, and the earnings and intermarriage of manual workers in the cotton and engineering industries in Rochdale between 1856 and 1964. Argues that an internal division of the manual working class around the axis of skill was a central feature of labour market and work relations in Britain between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-1960s.

New Working-Class Studies

New Working-Class Studies PDF

Author: John Russo

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1501718576

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"We put the working class, in all its varieties, at the center of our work. The new working-class studies is not only about the labor movement, or about workers of any particular kind, or workers in any particular place—even in the workplace. Instead, we ask questions about how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community. We explore how class both unites and divides working-class people, which highlights the importance of understanding how class shapes and is shaped by race, gender, ethnicity, and place. We reflect on the common interests as well as the divisions between the most commonly imagined version of the working class—industrial, blue-collar workers—and workers in the 'new economy' whose work and personal lives seem, at first glance, to place them solidly in the middle class."—from the Introduction In John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon's book, contributors trace the origins of the new working-class studies, explore how it is being developed both within and across fields, and identify key themes and issues. Historians, economists, geographers, sociologists, and scholars of literature and cultural studies introduce many and varied aspects of this emerging field. Throughout, they consider how the study of working-class life transforms traditional disciplines and stress the importance of popular and artistic representations of working-class life.