"Today the worker is not only the engine of production but also the consumer. She
sells her labor cheap and buys at full price." In his brief but rousing new book, Workin'
on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History, Walter Mosley questions both
the ends and means of triumphal capitalism. He calls on working Americans of all
ethnicities to ask themselves what they deserve for a lifetime of labor. Air that
doesn't make them asthmatic? Exemplary education for their children? Renumeration for
childrearing? A "medical bill of rights?" Make a list, counsels Mosley, and see
how closely it coincides with "the rather small and insignificant goals of the few
who own (or control) almost everything." If at least 10 percent of us articulate and
answer this question, if we carry our lists around, consult them often, argue their
merits, vote by them, the year 2000 might represent a genuine turning point in our
history.
Christian readers committed to serving others may object to Mosley's insistence
that we consult our own interests—but not if they are familiar with Mosley's
fiction. Author of the popular Easy Rawlins detective novels and creator of Socrates
Fortlow, the deeply wise ex-con hero of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,
Mosley shows how inextricably linked are self-regard and compassion. "The goals of
revolution," says Mosley in his new book, "are realized by personal
enlightenment." To this end, he advises us to suspend the influence of the
"spectacles and illusions" that hypnotize us by spending 90 days without TV,
movies, or professional sports.
We might use this time, offers Mosley, to consider what the experience of African
Americans can teach the rest of us—about dealing with learned self-hatred, about
using educational opportunities to investigate the history of oppression and its
resistance. We might look in the mirror and learn to appreciate both the unique personal
history and "the billion years of the striving of life" that produced each of
us. In this way we are bound to see ourselves and others as more than a race, a gender, a
class, or an age. Mosley further proposes that we tell the truth once a day—about
something, anything—and observe the changes that ensue both inside and outside us.
THIS READER MIGHT suggest another resource for those 90 evenings of silence: Field
Guide to the Global Economy. Authors Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, and Thea Lee
broaden Mosley's discussion to the situation of working people around the world.
Readable even by those who dropped Economics 1 after the first week, this slim volume
explains what is new about the economic globalization of the last two decades.
From Field Guide we learn how the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
work in practice, funding infrastructure and industry that largely benefit foreign
investors, and how these multinational investors maximize profits by, among other means,
reporting gains in countries with low tax rates and losses where rates are high.
Easy-to-read tables and graphs are plentiful, as are clarifying examples. Between 1994 and
1996, for instance, General Motors moved nearly half its production of the Suburban SUV
from Janesville, Wisconsin, to Silao, Mexico. Although GM paid its Mexican employees 8
percent of the average wage it paid American workers manufacturing the Suburban, the price
of the SUV over that period continued to rise (and rises still).
Field Guide calls into question the closed-door meetings and the limited and
nonelected membership of the World Trade Organization, founded in 1994 to rule bindingly
on trade disputes among member nations. Most forcefully, the book describes the effects of
unbounded and unregulated commerce on life in so-called Third World nations. The
conversion of local agriculture and industry to production of export products uproots
populations. Social services are cut to pay interest on foreign debt. Environmental
controls are weakened, and governments eager to appear "stable" to foreign
investors increasingly violate human rights. The last chapter of Field Guide
details some responses to globalization in the United States and abroad, and an appendix
provides a satisfying list of organizations working on the issue from many angles.
Barbara Ehrenreich suggests in her introduction to Field Guide that the process
of "globalization could lead to a safer, more peaceful and—who knows?—more
interesting world," but not when corporate profiteering is its only, or even its
primary, driver. Should Christians cooperate in handing over the keys? "The margin of
profit," says Mosley, has come to "define our humanity." Surely that
prerogative belongs elsewhere.
JO ANN HEYDRON is a poet and fiction writer living in California.
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