The most recommended books about class conflict

A powerful parent dies and each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways -- and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. This is an “everything” book. It took over my life. It overwhelmed my brain and mind. The utterly believable characters so generously intermingled and interwoven, familial and dynamic in their pushing and pulling, loving and hating - ignited by a precipitating event so abrupt yet simple, with consequences that spin out of control. Reading this tale, you feel as if you are drowning in a fever dream - Joyce Carol Oates once again as she has since Them (1969), offering innumerable reasons for wonderment.

First of all, I love all of Alix E. Harrow’s books. They have strong female protagonists who push back against the hands that they’re dealt.

This book is, at its core, the tale of a haunted house, but it’s so much more than that. There is love and death and class warfare and sentiment and harsh reality, all intertwined in the breathing soul of a house with something to prove, someone to protect, a lineage to honor.

Like all of Harrow’s works, there’s magic in the mundane, and she brings the dead-end town in Appalachia to pulsing life despite the grit and destitution built into its system. It was a joy to snuggle down to another chapter or two every night.

In addition to its excellent coverage of the economics of this transformation, its historical account of the shift in class partnerships makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the period. In the Golden Age of the previous period Big Business maintained a fraught alliance with its unions willing to pay growing wages closely aligned with labor productivity growth with the grudging acceptance of higher taxes and regulations of the Keynesian era leaving small business to fend for itself. Once Japan and Germany reindustrialized creating a more competitive economic landscape Kotz describes the full-blown class warfare identified by Buffet as Big Business realigned with small business to fight for cuts to its wages, taxes, regulatory costs and unions, and progressive politics.

The inspiration for the movie Metropolis, a city is torn between an elite upper class, and a working-class, who toil in agony underground. It begins with Freder, the son of the powerful Metropolis leader who encounters a working-class prophet named Maria. Freder feels drawn to the woman and searches for her. Meanwhile, Freder’s father visits a bitter adversary named Rotwang. A mad scientist type, Rotwang tells him that he’s built a robot replica of a woman they once both loved, whose name was Hel. Like an enigma wrapped in a mystery, the robot creates a dense and secretive narrative. Divulging old motivations and riddles behind the characters, adds to the story, but the robot becomes both ethereal and powerful, a form of immortality and the path to destruction.

In 1882, only a few years after it enacted a series of landmark civil rights laws, Congress passed an Exclusion Act slamming the door on Chinese immigration. Why the dramatic turnaround? A powerful anti-Chinese movement, driven by racism and fear of economic competition, had taken hold among whites in the West and had produced a wave of anti-Asian state laws. Americans east of the Rockies didn't share Western sentiments, but eventually Eastern politicians yielded in order to attract Western votes. Gyory gives us an absorbing picture of the exclusion movement, of Western anti-Chinese leaders, and of the Easterners who went along with them. His book is a stark reminder that good people's indifference can contribute to the triumph of evil.

I don’t believe anyone can consider themselves a serious student of American history or a true critic of American foreign policy without having read and absorbed Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zinn writes as a masterful historian and an unflinching critic of the inequity and brutality of the American system, both aspects of the country’s history he brought to light at a time when others neglected to do so.

He brought voice to the voiceless and paved the way for the dozens of equally valuable critical voices that came after him. Zinn was the original people’s historian; his book simply cannot be missed.

The fact that the capitalist class organizations, with their use of capital strike and flight, lobbying, funding right-wing “grassroots” organizations, think tanks, media, and Chicago school intellectuals, wanted to drive economic policy in a certain direction does not inevitably lead to the conclusion that they would have succeeded in achieving these goals. Neoliberal policies could not have been implemented in even a nominal democracy without at least a modicum of support from its victims. Remarkably, large sections of the American electorate vote for and support policies that favor the very business class that has profited from their economic decline. This is the first book to describe the abandonment of the Democratic Party by less-educated Whites which had a significant effect on the American shift to the right from the 1970s onward. My co-authors and I explore this shift in up-to-date detail in our book.

While many celebrated the ethnic revival of the 1960s and the social justice causes that grew from them, Steinberg offers a powerful and challenging thesis that argues the limits of ethnicity. A sense of ethnic re-birth, he argues, can only occur once ethnicity is gone. Rather than empowering a new generation of social justice youth, ethnicity proves a myth.

This book is a deep dive into what makes Japan special. William G. Beasley (1919-2006), a long-time professor at the University of London, was one of his generation’s finest Japanologists. This book highlights the enormous achievements of the Meiji generation, who alone among non-Western leaders, positioned their country to win the game of economic catch-up.

For Martin Gilens, the normal business of governing in the U.S. is largely untroubled by the preferences and desires of anybody but the wealthy.  Gilens looks at thousands of proposed policy changes, and the degree of support for each among poor, middle-class, and affluent Americans. His findings: when preferences of low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, there is virtually no relationship between policy outcomes and the desires of less advantaged groups. In contrast, affluent Americans’ preferences exhibit a substantial relationship with policy outcomes whether their preferences are shared by lower-income groups or not.