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

Peck, Jamie

Vijay Prashad, Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare (Cambridge, MA: South End Press 2003)

IN THIS UNCOMPROMISING book--which started life as The American Scheme, published in India in 2001--Vijay Prashad develops a trenchant and wide-ranging critique of what might be characterized as the neoliberal settlement in the US. It is very much a big-picture book, focused on the fateful conjuncture of economic restructuring, conservative politics, and what Prashad depicts as a form of first-world structural adjustment.

This amounts to a systemic analysis of the domesticated form of neoliberalism--an assessment of the impact of the Washington consensus "at home," if you like. As the author modestly observes in the book's introduction, "Here I am, an Indian historian with a tendency to write about racism, and a scribbler on matters political, trying to write a book on so vast a topic." (vii) Seemingly undaunted, he delivers a punchy analysis of the logics that connect rising inequality, wealth concentration, and the punitive management of the poor. Although Prashad now teaches in the US, his ability to see the American political economy at something of a distance is a distinctive feature of this book. Its achievement is to tie together a series of political-economic tendencies and moments, portraying these as necessarily connected components of a neoliberal political conjuncture, together with its own, historically distinctive, process of class formation, and then to imagine alternative political futures.

Prashad describes a hypertrophied neoliberal state, bifurcating between a CEO class and a contingent class. Analytically, the book's task is to connect together the various axes of oppression that produce the variegated contingent class, along with its typical conditions of impoverishment and exclusion. "Prisons are not far from welfare offices," Prashad writes, (xv) "but do we have a theory of our world to make sense of the links between them, to find the connections at a structural level?" Politically, the parallel challenge is to explore those emergent social struggles and movements--labour-community alliances, anti-sweatshop campaigns, immigrant organizing efforts, feminist and antiracist mobilizations, human-rights movements, and so forth--that might act as carriers for new kinds of politics with the potential to transcend this destructive neoliberal conjuncture. As a "movement book," (ix) Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses both grows out of, and seeks to feed into, this political firmament.

The foundation for Prashad's critique is a broad-brush interpretation of US-style neoliberalism, portrayed as an hegemonic political-economic ideology with roots in the economic slowdown of the 1970s and the rise of Reaganomics. Crucially, the proactively regressive response to these deteriorating economic conditions involved off loading costs and risks to the poor, while insulating both the wealthy and corporate profitability. The accompanying state strategy, pioneered by Reagan and normalized since, "was not to shrink government in total, [but] to refocus ... away from the creation of equity and toward the maintenance of law and order." (xvi) So defined, the American path to neoliberalism would subsequently comprise four components. The first has involved the defunding and dismantling of the social state, as autocritiques of "big government" and Darwinian moralizing accompanied a sustained attack against the practices of the welfare state, against the principles of social equity, and, by implication, against the poor themselves. Second, the punitive arms of the state have been significantly augmented, as a culture of control and containment have taken root. Prashad vividly characterizes this expansion of policing, penal, and military functions as a domestic application of the Powell Doctrine of "overwhelming force." Third, this redisciplining of the poor has found an hypocritical reflection in the creation of a New Deal for the rich, as euphemistically-named corporate welfare programs have proliferated and as a dynamic of accelerating tax cuts has been entrenched. For the architects of America's neoliberal settlement, this policy delivers the triple benefit of rewarding conservative electoral constituencies, locking in income gains for the wealthy, and choking off the supply of tax dollars to the social state. Finally, political consent under this regime of systemic inequality is "bred through cruel forms of cultural nationalism,"(xx) xenophobia, consumerism, individualism, and the restoration of racialized and gendered notions of self-reliance.

The bulk of the book is given over to three essays--on debt, prisons, and workfare--each of which explores a constitutive strand of this wider process of neoliberal class restructuring, and each culminating in a (selective, but suggestive) discussion of the ascendancy of potentially transformative political countermovements. The chapter on debt conjoins the rise of Greenspan-era trickle up political economy, during which time the Dow Jones rose to inordinate prominence as the very "index of human reason," (5) with the proliferation of sweatshop economies and the structural expansion of contingent work. In a society in which half of all stocks are held by the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population, while the bottom four-fifths of Americans account for a measly 4 per cent, the (dubious but at the same time daunting) achievement of the neoliberal regime has been to transmit the costs of economic distress and instability with ruthless efficiency to the swelling ranks of the contingent workforce. Adding insult to injury, lousy wages and Dickensian working conditions constitute a downward pull on employment standards more generally, as the neoliberal regulatory regime works to "extract the maximum labor for the minimum expenditure," (23) while effectively evading and externalizing the costs of social reproduction. In the context of falling real wages, insecure employment, and a withering social state, Prashad asks, "Who will pay for the upkeep of this reserve army, this unemployed and shiftless population? ... Who is to feed, clothe, and shelter the contingent class?" (28) The answer, within a neoliberalized environment, is that the contingent class is on its own, immiseration and indebtedness being the grimly predictable outcomes.

Prashad's indictments of the prison and workfare systems are no less searing. While the perverse politics of mass incarceration and "welfare reform" are clearly racialized and gendered, there is also an underlying political-economic logic. In the final analysis, these are seen here as institutions of social control: "the only way the state has to keep the reserve army of labor in check is by [creating] lockdown conditions in urban areas." (166) Poor women of colour are propelled by work- fare programs into deadend McJobs in the service economy, or by the Bush Administration's "marriage incentives" into economic dependency on poor men. Meanwhile, for those in poor communities that cross the line into the drugs, vice, or crime economies, prison awaits. The jail, in this context, "becomes the storehouse of the redundant working population as well as its soup kitchen," (88) a mechanism for managing the undeserving indigent under conditions of total surveillance.

The most significant questions raised by Prashad's roiling critique of the bleak neoliberal conjuncture in the US are political ones. Keeping up with the Dow Joneses documents a systemic regime of inequality and oppression, and confers on this a certain antisocial logic. At the same time, Prashad sees transformative potential in a plethora of grassroots political movements that have been surfacing across the country in the past decade, many of which--like living-wage campaigns and movements for affordable housing and healthcare--can be seen to stem directly from the inequalities and dysfunctions of the neoliberal regime itself. There are no guarantees, of course, that these local struggles will ultimately coalesce into some antisystemic countermovment. Prashad concedes that at the time of the 1996 welfare repeal, "the unions did little, the welfare rights movement was in disarray, and the feminist movement let down the side." (165) Of course, these progressive forces were not asleep at the wheel. Their failure adequately to defend even the limited welfare settlement of the past lies partly with neoliberalism's facility for dividing and disorganizing social collectivities and other sources of potential opposition. This, in turn, underlines the challenges of progressive mobilizing in such a climate. Prashad's counterpoint, though, is that the structural and institutional conditions of this neoliberalized polity may also be (inadvertently, of course) seeding new forms of politics, generating new stakes and sites of struggle, and creating new class alliances.

Ultimately, Prashad's conclusions are optimistic in that be sees in these oppressive macropolitical conditions the bases for an incipient process of "social revolution from the bottom up," (193) waged by a radicalized contingent class, the disparate unity of which is forged out of conditions of shared exclusion, overlapping needs and demands, and an intensified sense of class antagonism against the Dow Joneses. Local struggles against the injustices of mass incarceration or the exploitation of contingent workers are seen here as the opening salvos in a process of contingent class formation and consciousness, the first stirrings of a political process that will develop its own dynamics. There is no Master Plan, but this is a road that will have to be made by walking. The continuing challenge, in this respect, is to connect politics of critique and resistance to the daily realities of contingent work and the long-term interests of contingent workers. As Prashad bluntly puts it, "there is no point in being ideologically right if you cannot at the same time translate those positions into the everyday struggles of the contingent." (192) This is the purpose of the book, which deserves a wide readership across the progressive movement. Those with specialist knowledge of particular fields like welfare reform, contingent work, or prisons policy will find little that is new in the specific parts of the book that deal with the issues closest to home, but the achievement here is to thread these strands together into a larger story about the neoliberal moment and its incipient contradictions. Whether Prashad's macropolitical aspirations will prove true must remain to be seen. But even if he is only half right, the first steps along this path have already been taken.

Jamie Peck

University of Wisconsin-Madison