Aronowitz, Stanley

ARONOWITZ, STANLEY (1933-2021). A political organizer, labor militant, and a Marxist sociologist, Stanley Aronowitz maintained a presence in the American left for more than fifty years.

Born and raised in New York City, Aronowitz grew up in the East Bronx (182nd Street and Prospect Avenue) in a working-class family. His mother, Frances, worked as a bookkeeper for a textile wholesaler. His father, Nat, joined the Work Projects Administration during the New Deal era. Both of his parents supported the American Labor Party.

Youthful Aronowitz took part in the summer camps and educational programs sponsored by the Communist Party. He took classes at the Jefferson School. There, starting when he was fourteen, he began studying philosophy, political economy, and history, leading him to the Classics. Encouraging his intellectual and political development, the Jefferson School also shaped his views on education and schooling. Concurrently, Aronowitz attended the High School of Music and Art, graduating in 1950, often later drawing inspiration from social and political significance he found in popular music. He learned labor and other “topical” songs in leftwing summer camps and would himself occasionally perform at events. As a high school student, he became active with the Young Progressives for America.

Aronowitz entered Brooklyn College in 1950 and became president of the Philosophy Club. He was suspended during his first semester for protesting the decision to shut down the student newspaper because it had broken a ban on publishing political articles. Aronowitz decided not to return to the college. Through the United Electrical Workers, he found a job as a lens grinder (like Spinoza, he would often note) in midtown Manhattan, rising to shop steward. By the middle 1950s a steelworker at the Driver-Harris plant, he helped organize reading groups and was active in a takeover of the local. By coincidence, his future friend and colleague at the City University of New York, Bogdan Denitch, also working at the plant, joined in the shopfloor militancy.

The futility of the shopfloor struggles shaped his views on the limits of bureaucratized labor unions and of contract unionism generally. He spent long hours reading at the public library. Laid off during the recession of 1960, he applied to the organizer training program of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and after a year-long training became a field organizer. He then moved on to the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers from 1964-1967, where he served as director of organizing for the northeast region. During these years, criss-crossing the country as an organizer, Aronowitz became much more politically active, often serving as a bridge between the labor movement and the political movements of the emerging New Left.

His experiences in the Bronx and in the factories of New Jersey, together with his political instincts and theoretical insights, led him to grapple with the importance of cultural factors, the necessity for multi-ethnic and anti-racist left organizations, the centrality of the labor question, and the fundamental importance of democratic organization. Never entirely comfortable within a campus-dominated New Left a generation younger than himself, not exactly a theoretician in the Marcuse style, and never as influential as his younger strategic counterpart ,Tom Hayden, Aronowitz nevertheless quickly became known as a charismatic and riveting speaker on a perpetual lecture tour.

Bayard Rustin enlisted Aronowitz to help mobilize for the March on Washington that would take place in 1963. Aronowitz struggled to gain support from organized labor and met with Malcom X, who promised to send 5000 of his supporters. Meanwhile, Aronowitz became a regular columnist of The National Guardian and an editorial board member in the final years of the journal Studies on the Left, which closed its doors in 1966.

Aronowitz's anti-war activism and other political activities did not sit well with the ILGWU, which fired him in 1967. Aronowitz enrolled in the New School in 1967, taking up a program that did not require him to attend any classes but gave him credits based on his previous writings. He graduated in 1968, the same year that he would start work as an associate director at the social work agency Mobilization for Youth in New York City. From there he would go on to found the experimental Park East High School, which he ran from 1970 to1972.

Having landed a teaching position at Staten Island Community College in 1972, Aronowitz dedicated himself to completing a manuscript that combined his experiences in the labor movement with his intellectual background in Marxist theory and political economy. Strongly influenced by European Marxists such as Karl Korsch and Herbert Marcuse as well as American radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, False Promises (1973) was both an attempt to give a historical overview of the formation of the American working class and a critical assessment of the failures of the labor movement. It was free from jargon and scholastic formalities, accessible to activists as well as academics, and would prove his most influential book. On the basis of the great success of False Promises, Aronowitz suddenly became much more employable. Having received a PhD in 1975 from Union Graduate School, Aronowitz left for California where he became a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego and then a tenured full professor at the University of California, Irvine from 1977-1982. In California, Aronowitz became close to Herbert Marcuse and good friends with Fredric Jameson. Jameson and Aronowitz would found the journal Social Text in 1979.

Never in a position to become a leader of Students for a Democratic Society, Aronowitz did not engage the New American Movement (NAM) until 1976, but became active in its Los Angeles chapter and taught classes for them, becoming influential in encouraging a wide intellectual turn toward Antonio Gramsci. By 1982, Aronowitz returned to New York City, and partly influenced by his old friend Denitch, became active in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) led by Michael Harrington. He supported the merger of NAM with DSOC, creating the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but later regretted this move as sinking the remnant of the New Left into the peripheries of the Democratic Party. He helped found the Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC) in 1983, which quickly became a major venue for yearly meetings of leftists from throughout the United States and beyond. The SSC continued until 2004 when the Left Forum began, again with his influence significant, and continued as the largest yearly left conference in the United States.

From 1983 until his retirement in 2017, Aronowitz taught sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 1988, he founded a new research center, the Center for Cultural Studies (later renamed the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work) which would become an important space for the training of radical organizers and coordinate critical research, publications, and conferences. He would author, co-author, or edit more than thirty books that focused on questions of Marxist theory, the labor movement, education, and the study of culture.

Aronowitz continued being active in the labor movement, as a main figure in forming the New Caucus, a group of progressive academics at City University of New York, which took over control of the leadership of the Professional Staff Congress in 2000. In 2002 Aronowitz became the Green Party nominee for governor of New York. Aronowitz's dedication to radical education and need for imagination and thinking was a constant throughout his career and toward that end he cofounded the left journal, Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination (2005) and also cofounded the Institute for the Radical Imagination (to organize programs for popular education and to sponsor critical research outside the control of universities). He remained faithful to the principles of democracy and need to overcome capitalism until his death.

Aronowitz, Stanley. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

Sayres, Sohnya, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson, eds. The 60s Without Apology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.