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

Description

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 reelection of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

Mike Davis was a meat cutter and truck driver, as well as an activist for Students for a Democratic Society before starting his academic career. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. His many books on history and the city, including the bestselling City of Quartz, have been critically acclaimed across the world.

Impressive - a perceptive and rigorous structural analysis. -- David Montgomery * The Nation * One of the most uncompromising books about American political economy ever written - brilliant, provocative, and exhaustively researched. * Village Voice * 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 *