Much of what Vijay Prashad writes in Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses is not new, but is said with such clarity and precise insight that this little book will remain a useful resources for activists and teachers for years to come. Keeping Up may be accurately described as a reader on neo-liberal austerity and class warfare in the US. It focuses on three main categories – debt, prison, and workfare – to show how they are used against the working class in order to discipline it, keep it divided and weaken its organizations. But Prashad doesn’t limit the discussion to this negative result. He describes developing struggles in the labor movement and community organizations that are fighting back.
Debt is the first concept Prashad uses to link together various aspects of economic crisis in the US. In order to boost profits, corporations have come to rely more on contingent labor, or temporary, contract, sweatshop, prison, day, workfare or other forms of labor that create an unstable, insecure position for workers. Three in ten workers, Prashad points out, are already defined as contingent, and job growth occurs more rapidly in contingent work than any other sector of the economy. Increasingly consumer debt is a main form of subsistence for millions of contngent workers. Likewise, public debt fuels austerity measures that have decimated, and in some cases eliminated, the social safety net. The people in the category of contingent work fluidly blend with unemployed, undocumented immigrant and incarcerated workers. A result of the growing contingent workforce (and its economic degradation) is increased leverage the capitalist class has over organized as well as unorganized workers. As Prashad puts it, "Capitalism…maintains this reserve army through the coercive mechanisms of incarceration, the fear of being illegal, and of being without dignity." This physical and psychological coercion is "part of its class war against organized labor, to discipline away from the ambition to challenge the structure of the system."
But as Prahsad illustrates, workers haven’t just rolled over. Unions have fought the use of prison labor as a source of production and profit for prison corporations, linking, sometimes, the expansion of the prison industrial complex to institutional racism. Other unions have fought for employer provided childcare, expanded healthcare packages to cover major illnesses such as AIDS, and even subsidization of housing for workers. These kinds of struggles go beyond just defensive strategies to improving the quality of life of workers outside of the workplace. Additionally, the 1997 Teamster strike at UPS sought to convert contingent part-time work into full-time union jobs. This victory helped rejuvenate the Teamsters. Immigrant workers throughout the last 15 years have put to rest the myth that workers who fear deportation will not organize or strike. Even when employers have threatened to use federal agencies like the INS to arrest and deport union leaders, immigrant workers have fought back. They have won major victories as exemplified by the growing success of coalitions like Justice for Janitors and the broad labor movement in New York City that supported the taxi workers strike (largely organized by South Asian immigrant drivers) in 1998.
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So the story Prashad relates is not just about the working class, especially those who are most exploited, being trampled under the iron heel of capitalism. They are fighting back. And as the broad left thinks about "where to go from here," Prashad offers some keen insight: "Those among the contingent who are in organizations are at work building capacity for the class to make a push toward socialism. The fight for a living wage, against prisons, for a revaluation of work and welfare: these are the main avenues for the contingent class’ battle for the resources to take the struggle deeper." This is where the frontlines of the class struggle and the fight for democracy are to be found.
Keeping up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare
By Vijay Prashad
Boston, South End Press, 2003.
