Current Reading

Because I'm too busy to think of anything for a daily post. These books are cool though. So are the reviews that I linked to:

I'm reading James Laxer's The Undeclared War: class conflict in the age of cyber capitalism, it's from 1998, but I got it 2nd-hand maybe five years ago and always meant to get to it. So I'm getting to it. link

Laxer sums it up best when he states that: capitalism works best for a small minority of the world's people, condemns hundreds of millions to exploitation and a stunted existence, and leaves billions, particularly in the Third World, in a state of poverty or near poverty. And yet, the hoary idea persists that the pursuit of profit, regardless of the people who are in the way, is the best means to meet the needs of the human race and to broaden its potential for the future.

I finished Stanley Aronowitz's False Promises:The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness from 1974 (which I decided to read as an historical document) and it was pretty damned good. link

Aronowitz traces the historical development of the American working class from post-Civil War times and shows why radical movements have failed to overcome the forces that tend to divde groups of workers from one another. The rise of labor unions is analyzed, as well as their decline as a force for social change. Aronowitz’s new introduction situates the book in the context of developments in current scholarship and the epilogue discusses the effects of recent economic and political changes in the American labor movement.