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

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

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.