The American Road to Capitalism
Thursday, March 29, 4pm, 8417 Social Science
CHARLES POST is Professor Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College-City University of New York. His intellectual interests include the origins of capitalism, the determinants and dynamics of working class consciousness and organization, social conflict and capitalist state policy, and the restructuring of industrial capitalist production historically. He is the author of The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development, and Political Conflict, 1620-1877 (Brill Academic Publishers, 2011), which has been short-listed for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. According to Robert Brenner, “In The American Road to Capitalism, Charles Post offers a brilliant reinterpretation of the origins and diverging paths of economic evolution in the American north and south. The first systematic historical materialist account of US development from the colonial period through the civil war in a very long time, it is sure to be received as a landmark contribution.” Post has also published in New Left Review, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Historical Materialism and Against the Current. He is also a long-time activist on the socialist left and in the American Federation of Teachers.