Author: Andrew Ross

Note: The distinguished leftist organizer, intellectual, and sociologist Stanley Aronowitz passed away earlier this week. Andrew Ross, his colleague on the journal Social Text, made the following comments at a CUNY symposium devoted to Aronowitz in 2017.   The first time we met was at the epic 1983 Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture conference in Champaign-Urbana. Alongside Stanley and other heavyweight thinkers, there was a younger generation of folks like myself who were there to figure out how to renew the Marxist tradition on our own terms. The conference was focused squarely on the cultural turn, and so...

Thoughts One Can’t Do Without Introduction Over the years, in the process of writing a book, I have remembered an experience from an earlier part of my life that is directly relevant to its topic. The memory often comes quite late in the writing process. Its suppression until that point suggests that the experience shaped the choice of the topic, and also that the delay ensured any such revelation would not jeopardize the narrative. The moment of recall typically comes as an epiphany, so it always invites some self-analysis. But I never found it useful to write about such...