Stanley Aronowitz (January 6, 1933 – August 16, 2021) was an American sociologist, trade union official, and political activist. A professor of sociology, cultural studies, and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center, his longtime political activism and cultural criticism was influential in the New Left movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. He was also an advocate for organized labor and a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society.[8] In 2012, Aronowitz was awarded the Center for Study of Working Class Life's Lifetime Achievement Award at Stony Brook University.[3]
Aronowitz became involved in the American labor movement in New Jersey, and in 1959, while laid off from his job as a metalworker, he found work with the New Jersey Industrial Union Council. Collaborating with the council's president, Aronowitz cowrote New Jersey's unemployment compensation law, subsequently enacted by the state legislature in 1961.
His work with the Industrial Union Council led to Aronowitz's appointment as director of the organizing and boycott department of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Aronowitz spent four years traveling throughout the United States to develop the union's campaigns.
In the 1960s, while employed with the Clothing Workers, Aronowitz began participating in the Civil Rights Movement. He engaged in lunch counter sit-ins and gave speeches on the labor movement's behalf to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee on the confluence of African-American civil rights and economic issues.
Through his work in civil rights, Aronowitz secured the role of labor coordinator, appointed by Bayard Rustin, on the planning committee of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1962–3. Aronowitz was tasked with soliciting the support of American labor unions for the march, and while encountering resistance from the majority of trade unions, most notably the AFL–CIO, he secured the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, United Packinghouse Workers of America, as well as rubber and clothing workers' unions.[5]
Aronowitz died on August 16, 2021, from complications of a stroke, in Manhattan.[7][10]
In that article, he stated that with this publication, "Our objective was to interrogate Marxists' habitual separation of political economy and culture and to make a contribution to their articulation, even reunification." Aronowitz, however, was not a working editor at the time of the Sokal scandal and had not seen the paper before publication. In an interview in the Brooklyn Rail after the publication of Taking it Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals, he cited Mills's influence on his beliefs when he states, "My own insights, as a result of my own experience as a worker, as a trade unionist, and as an activist, were stimulated and, to some extent, guided by Mills’s example. His three major books on American social structure—The New Men of Power, White Collar, and The Power Elite—together constitute a compelling intellectual program for our own times."[3]
2002 gubernatorial campaign
In 2002, he was the Green Party of New York's nominee for governor. It was his first and only campaign for public office. He was just the second Green candidate for governor. Described as "The Anti-Candidate, Out To Anger The Rich" by the New York Times, he said of his campaign "My job is to start a public conversation, to show voters they have a choice and to get enough of a vote so we can stay on the ballot and speak out." In June 2002, his campaign had raised approximately $25,000 and was expected to raise just $150,000.[12] His campaign finished in 5th place, receiving 41,797 votes (.89%).
In 1976, Aronowitz (then living in San Diego and teaching at UC-Irvine, joined the New American Movement. In 2010, he would write a lengthy essay titled, "The New American Movement and Why It Failed" for the journal Work and Days.[14]
In 2005 Aronowitz co-founded the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. He has also published articles in numerous publications and with a core group of intellectuals—faculty and students—at the Graduate Center, he spearheaded the effort to create the Center for Cultural Studies (now the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work) in the spirit of fostering intellectual debate, multidisciplinarity, and the toppling of high cultural privilege in academia.[citation needed] In 1969, Aronowitz, Jeremy Brecher, Paul Mattick Jr., and Peter Rachleff, began sporadically publishing a magazine and pamphlet series called Root & Branch.[15][16]
Family
Aronowitz lived in New York City. He was first married to Jane O'Connell until divorcing in 1962 and was then married to Ellen Willis from 1998 until her death in November 2006.[7][17] He had five children, including Nona Willis-Aronowitz.[18][7]
^Ward, Tony (May 8, 2013). "Stanley Aronowitz". Tony Ward Education. Archived from the original on December 20, 2016. Retrieved December 8, 2016. [Stanley] was deeply influenced by Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation and One-Dimensional Man and in 1972-3 he met Marcuse who had responded to the manuscript for his first book, the acclaimed False Promises: The Shaping of American Working-Class Consciousness.
^ abAronowitz, Stanley (2016). "Biography". StanleyAronowitz.org. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved August 25, 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^Ness, Immanuel (1995). Trade unions and the unemployed: Organizing strategies, conflict, and control (PhD thesis). Graduate Center, CUNY. p. iii. OCLC1043905373. ProQuest304187945.
