Gary Roth

Gary Roth is the author of The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility (Pluto Press, 2019). 

October 2025Field Notes

The New Fascism

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What a puzzling picture the new fascism presents, a fascism of lawyers rather than paramilitaries. The lawyers’ specialty: finding loopholes and contradictions within the tens of thousands of administrative regulations that emanate from government agencies. A field day for critics of democratic bureaucracy!

June 2025Field Notes

Higher Education in Retreat

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Appeasement and accommodation, while regrettable within the academic community because of the retreat from sacrosanct ideas such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, nonetheless set the stage for developments that followed the national elections at the end of last year. Martin Niemöller’s self-confession about his support for the German fascists during the 1930s captures nicely the corner into which the higher education community had boxed itself: "When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest."

June 2024Field Notes

Class Protests

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Reaction to the students, nonetheless, has been overwhelming. They have somehow put their fingers on a set of issues that make policy-makers and power-brokers extremely nervous. The role of new-found billionaires in the pushback against the students is also unprecedented.
LAPD arresting student protestors the day after they raided the student encampment, 2024. Photo: Darlene L, Matt Baretto.

June 2023Field Notes

The New ‘Old’ Unionism: The Strike Campaign at Rutgers University

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The new unionists think in terms of the organizing drives of the mid- to late-1930s, a near-century’s worth of hind-gazing. It’s a perspective that interferes with their ability to act in the here-and-now, a perspective that misses opportunities to reimagine what a union can accomplish. This was the case for the part-time faculty (adjuncts) union at Rutgers University in New Jersey, whose strike recently ended in a major victory. A lucky, and to some extent unanticipated, confluence of factors helped win the clash with management.
Courtesy the author.

June 2021Field Notes

The Future of Automation

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Gary Roth reviews two timely and important books—Jason E. Smith’s Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation and Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work.
The Future of Automation

June 2020Field Notes

Higher Education and the Remaking of the Working Class

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During its heyday following World War II, a college education was a means to lift parts of the working class into a newly-defined middle class, no longer based on the occupations of the past but instead conceived in terms of education, home ownership, well-paid employment, and household consumption.

September 2019Field Notes

Weimar: Then or Now?

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For reasons somewhat unclear, liberal democracy, when pushed to its logical extension in terms of actual, and not just hypothetical, equal rights for all, also generates social forces that call for its own curtailment.
Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauch-Kulturepoche Deutschlands, (detail), 1919. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013 / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Jörg P. Anders.

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