Using an innovative framework, this reader examines the most important and influential writings on modern class relations. * Uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines scholarship from political economy, social history, and cultural studies * Brings together more than 50 selections rich in theory and empirical detail that span the working, middle, and capitalist classes * Analyzes class within the larger context of labor, particularly as it relates to conflicts over and about work * Provides insight into the current crisis in the global capitalist system, including the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the explosion of Arab Spring, and the emergence of class conflict in China

Stanley Aronowitz is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA, where he has taught since 1983. He is also Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology, and Work at the Graduate Center. He studies labor, social movements, science and technology, education, social theory, and cultural studies. He is the author of twenty-five books, including The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Worker's Movement (2014); Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals (2012); Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters (2008); Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006); and How Class Works (2003). Michael James Roberts is Associate Professor of Sociology at San Diego State University, USA, where he teaches courses on social and cultural theory, the history of the American labor movement, race/class intersectionality, mass media, and popular culture. He is the author of Tell Tchaikovsky the News (2014), which was nominated for the annual Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book by the American Sociological Association's section on culture. His work has also been published in the journals Race & Class, Rethinking Marxism, Mobilization, Popular Music, and The Sociological Quarterly.

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