Class Struggle in the Academy brings together nearly fifty years of Barbara Foley's Marxist writing, locating both theoretical controversies and campus activism in the shifting historical pressures and constraints of global capital.

Spanning her career as an activist, academic, and key participant in debates about the ideological function of the academic disciplines, this book comprises three sections that stake out different historical phases in the deep structure of global economics and politics - through the Cold War, neoliberal triumphalism, and the decline of empire in the 21st century - to reassesses the concept of class to anchor politics and ideology in the deep historical structures from which they arise. Across essays, interviews, and reviews, as well as previously unpublished work, Foley brings a critical, Marxist lens to the culture wars, the controversies of Western Marxism, and intersectionality and the Black Lives Matter movement, as class is used as a vital analytical frame to understand higher education, academic work, and educational praxis.

Energized by Foley's many years of personal involvement in antiracist, antiwar, and academic labor activism, this highly readable book is of great interest to anyone seeking to understand - and resist - the current assault on higher education in the United States.

Barbara Foley is Emerita Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, having retired from teaching in 2019. She is Associate Editor at the Marxist journal Science & Society and remains active in the Radical Caucus of the MLA (Modern Language Association) and the Marxist Literary Group. She is the author of, among titles, Marxist Literary Criticism Today (2019), Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (2010), and Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (1986). She currently divides her time between New Jersey and Rome, Italy.