Libertarian | Stanley Aronowitz - Working class hero: a new strategy for labor (1983...

Stanley Aronowitz - Working class hero: a new strategy for labor (1983)Working Class Hero is ambitious, provocative, and exasperating. Aronowitz examines the crises that afflict the American labor movement today and the reasons that have led to its industrial and political decline. He argues that the labor movement needs a new strategy that is appropriate to the conditions it faces: deindustrialization, the feminization of the work force, the steady rationalization of work, and the growth of technical and intellectual labor. The final chapter of Working Class Hero outlines what such a strategy might entail. Aronowitz argues that the labor movement should form a new political bloc with social movements that raise such "postmaterialist" issues as feminism, black liberation, and self-management. These issues speak to the needs of women, blacks, and the "technical intelligentsia," workers who are located in the new regions of capitalist growth. According to Aronowitz, the revival of the labor movement depends upon its ability to go beyond economism and raise postmaterialist demands that appeal to workers in sunrise industries.