Stanley Aronowitz is a veteran political activist and cultural critic. He is a distinguished professor of sociology at the City University of New York and a passionate champion of organized labor. In 2002, Stanley Aronowitz leads the fight to maintain the official ballot status of the Green Party in New York State. He is running a grass roots campaign based on a radical democratic program that combines opposition to corporate power and plutocratic government with commitment to a sustainable environment, racial equality, feminism, gay liberation and individual freedom.
Stanley Aronowitz was born in 1933 and grew up in the Bronx, New York City. He attended Brooklyn College until he was suspended for leading a sit-in in the Dean’s office to protest the suppression of the radical student newspaper. After leaving school he became a steelworker and then a union organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (now UNITE) and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers.
Aronowitz received his B.A. from the New School in 1968 and became associate director of the anti-poverty organization Mobilization for Youth, where he was also a community organizer. In the early `70s he founded Park East High School in East Harlem, the first post-war experimental public high school in New York City, and taught community studies at the College of Staten Island. He has since taught at the University of California Irvine, the Center for Worker Education at City College of the City University of New York, and CUNY Graduate Center, where he is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education.
Aronowitz was a New Left activist during the `60s. He was the chief New York organizer for the Independent Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an editor of the influential journal Studies on the Left, and taught at the radical Free University of New York. He is presently an elected officer of the CUNY faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress.
In 1973 Aronowitz published his first book, the acclaimed False Promises: The Shaping of American Working-Class Consciousness. He has written 15 books in all. The most recent are The Last Good Job in America, essays on culture and politics; The Knowledge Factory, a critique of the corporatization of higher education; and From the Ashes of the Old, an analysis of the state of the labor movement. His book on class in America, Class Rules, will be published in 2003. He has also written about science and technology, philosophy and culture.
Aronowitz lives in Manhattan. He is married to the writer Ellen Willis, with whom he has a teenage daughter. He also has four older children.
Highlights of the Aronowitz Program
Tax and Spend. A high level of public goods and services is essential to a civilized society in the 21st century. That means high-quality schools and free tuition at top-flight public universities. It means state-funded health insurance that pays for the full range of people’s needs including birth control, abortion, and alternatives to conventional medicine. It means universal public child care and after-school programs. To afford these and other necessary social benefits we must revive progressive taxation while ending corporate welfare and tax giveaways to the rich.
Raise the Minimum Wage to at least $8 an hour and peg it to the regional cost of living. Extend unemployment compensation to 39 weeks.
Support the Right to Organize. Repeal the provision of the Taylor Law forbidding public employees to strike. Pass a law prohibiting employers from interfering with unionizing efforts by threatening or intimidating employees. Support collective bargaining rights for free-lance workers.
A Guaranteed Income must replace our bankrupt welfare system. Single mothers need economic independence, not pressure to get married.
Cut Working Hours to 6 hours a day, 30 a week, and mandate paid parental leave and sabbaticals. Let’s stop working ourselves to death. Ease the conflict between paid work and the “second shift.”
Repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws, whose draconian sentences have decimated black and Latino communities and destroyed the households of single mothers convicted of low-level nonviolent drug offenses. Legalize marijuana and decriminalize the use of other drugs.
Support Reproductive Freedom. Require employers’ health insurance plans to cover abortion as well as contraception. Prohibit the merging of secular hospitals with religious institutions that won’t offer women full reproductive health services.
Outlaw Anti-Gay Discrimination. Amend the New York State civil rights law to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. Recognize the right to marry regardless of gender as well as equal domestic partnership and parental benefits for those, homosexual or heterosexual, who choose not to marry.
Close Indian Point. Nuclear power plants are ecologically unsound as well as a target for terrorists. Reorient energy policy toward conservation and renewable energy sources. Avoid California’s mistakes: reregulate the utility companies.
Mandate Responsible Land Use. Regulate development; subsidize affordable housing; protect the watershed; grant tax credits for organic farming to revitalize local economies.
Democratize State Government, now an autocracy run by the governor and two legislative leaders. Institute public financing of all political campaigns, instant runoffs, and proportional representation to increase the viability and influence of minor parties.
Abolish the Death Penalty as every other liberal democracy has done. Capital punishment is highly arbitrary, discriminates against poor and black defendants who cannot afford an adequate defense, and by the nature of an imperfect justice system is bound to kill innocent people.
Support Democracy Post-September 11. Oppose the invocation of national security as an excuse to impose austerity, increase corporate welfare, curtail civil liberties, discriminate against immigrants, and mobilize a permanent war machine. Fear of terrorism cannot be allowed to subvert democracy. In these dangerous times, it is all the more important that we stand unequivocally for economic and social equality, freedom, and democratic government.
