Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare.

BY VIJAY PRASHAD

Vijay Prashad's latest book makes a solid contribution to the tools available for political education, analysis, and planning. Prashad, a professor of history at Trinity College, pumps out a slim volume or two annually, working from articles and lectures written along the way. His creatively-titled books explore the intersection of race and economy. The Karma of Brown Folk was a fresh examination of South Asian political and racial identity in the United States, and Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting argued to continue the history of black-Asian solidarity.

In Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses, Prashad offers more of his particular combination of numbers-heavy analysis, leftist passion, and down-to-earth campaign studies. Although much of the material has been covered elsewhere, including in Prashad's own magazine articles, not many books connect these three critical trends of debt, prison, and workfare, and even the sophisticated reader is unlikely to know each arena thoroughly. The debt chapter reviews the familiar material of the growing wealth gap, the rise of contingent work patterns, and the rise of a global sweatshop economy. Prashad supports with specifics his argument that working class people carry a disproportionate burden of debt that redistributes income upward. This chapter ends with economic justice case studies, including a detailed study of the New York City Taxi Workers Strike of 1998. The idealistic Prashad knows how to find the benefits in lost campaigns: people organized, press generated, new ideas put forth.

The prisons and workfare chapters also cover developments in those two fields over the 1990s. The discussion of immigrant detention facilities in the prisons chapter is particularly timely, and the business mechanics of the prison industrial complex provide a case study in themselves about how to research the money trail created by government/business collusion. Unfortunately, the prisons chapter does not include specific campaign case studies, even unsuccessful ones, but it does provide an overview of the issues activists are exploring, from voting disenfranchisement to preventing new prison development.

Keeping Up has some minor problems. It appears denser than it is, an easily-fixable design and editing flaw. Prashad is overly fond of the page-long paragraph and the complicated sentence. Occasionally, he introduces a rhetorical thread that goes nowhere, as when he uses the invisibility of domestic poverty as a long wind-up to a section about CEO compensation packages. The campaign junkie would want a more evaluative look at all of these campaigns, about decisions made along the way, about the tradeoffs inherent in negotiating with "the system." Nevertheless, Prashad's examples are clear and inspiring.

Prashad closes with two important questions that activists should take up. First, he asks, is the movement against economic globalization really just a mobilization rather than a movement that places the contingent class at the lead? And, how can activists project an effective use of government as a check against corporate power? A book with the answers should be hitting the shelves soon.