Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class

by Mike Davis

Overview

A brilliant and comprehensive study of class struggle in the United States

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786635907
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	07/17/2018
Series:	Essential Mike Davis
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.07(w) x 7.78(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, Buda’s Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Part 1 Labor and American Politics

1 Why the American Working Class is Different 3

2 The Barren Marriage of American Labor and the Democratic Party 55

3 The Fail of the House of Labor 105

Part 2 The Age of Reagan

4 The New Right's Road to Power 161

5 The Political Economy of Late Imperial America 187

6 Reaganomics' Magical Mystery Tour 239

7 The Lesser Evil? The Left, the Democrats and 1984 265

Epilogue: Inventing the American Left 311

Acknowledgements 329

Notes 331

Index 375

Editorial Reviews

One of the most uncompromising books about American political economy ever written—brilliant, provocative, and exhaustively researched.”
—Village Voice Literary Supplement

“Impressive—a perceptive and rigorous structural analysis.”
—David Montgomery, Nation

“Only a fool can disregard the implications of what he is arguing.”
—Social History

“Provocative and illuminating.”
—Journal of American Studies

“One of the most trenchant and original analyses of American politics.”
—Socialist Review

“Prisoners of the American Dream established [Davis’s] record of candidly examining the prospects for progressive social change and the dismal fate of organized labor in the United States, with its lack of a party or power.”
—Micah Uetricht, The Nation

From the Publisher