Working Class Series

This talk will discuss the history of deep reform in US history, showing the relationships among social movements and the necessity and operation of divisions in the ruling class. Zweig will explore case studies from Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the modern civil rights movement to help guide us in understanding and shaping the relation between social movements and electoral politics in the pursuit of deep systemic reform in this period.

About the Speaker

Michael Zweig is the founding director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life and emeritus professor of economics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Zweig got his PhD at the University of Michigan where as an undergraduate he was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society. He is the author of Religion and Economic Justice (1991), The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (2000), and Class, and Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism (2023), on which this talk is based.