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Activist Reviews

Economic (In)Security
The Wealth Inequality Reader
Edited by Chuck Collins, Amy Gluckman, Meizhu Lui,
Betsy Leondar-Wright, Amy Offner and Adria Scharf
Dollars and Sense, 2004
200 pages; $15.95, paperback

It’s All for Sale:
The Control of Global Resources
By James Ridgeway
Duke University Press, 2004
240 pages; $18.95, paperback

By Chris Ney

The first decade of the new century—sometimes called the zeds or the aughts—defy simple characterization, even as they defy a common name. But if the ’90s were the ’60s upside down, the zeds show some striking similarities to the 1970s.

Once again, the United States is stuck in a war that it entered because of flawed (or deceitful) analysis. The domestic impact of that war includes growing strain on public coffers, public trust and people’s lives; its global impact fuels a rising wave of anti-U.S. sentiment that would have been inconceivable before the ’70s. Despite the obvious errors in diplomatic and military policy, a principal architect of the war is tapped to lead a global anti-poverty agency that functions (at least formally) on the basis of consensus. (In the 1970s Robert McNamara led the World Bank; today, Paul Wolfowitz has been appointed to the same position.)

Economically, growing public debt and sagging investor confidence in the 1970s led to “stagflation,” a combination of low growth rates with high inflation. Today’s economic conditions have not been named but include growing corporate profit without broad-based job growth, investor confidence shaken by corporate scandal, record trade deficits and the continuing flow of jobs from the global North to the global South (now including high-skill jobs in the technology and medical fields as well as manufacturing posts). Soaring health care costs squeeze workers and businesses large and small, leading the markets to downgrade the credit rating of General Motors (a flagship of the U.S. economy and the nation’s largest private provider of health insurance) to near-junk bond status.

And, as an overarching theme, the neoconservatives in power are challenging long-respected—and hard-won—social policies that provided a minimum of economic security for most U.S. households. It is an environment that demands new approaches to economics and politics; as a result, economic literacy is now a critical skill for activists.

Two timely new books seek to provoke and deepen public discussion about these issues. The Wealth Inequality Reader is a collection of 34 essays edited by the staffs of the magazine Dollars and Sense and the organization United for a Fair Economy. It’s All for Sale, by Village Voice writer James Ridgeway, offers an encyclopedic description of the global trade in natural resources. Together they present an informative, often disturbing, picture of late capitalism’s impact on the planet and its people—and a sometimes inspiring picture of the resistance to its worst effects.

Just the Facts
Based on exhaustive research, Ridgeway’s book is a global tour de force of the trade in commodities. Each chapter outlines a broad category of items, ranging from metals to fuel, water and genes to flowers and human beings, describing how naturally occurring items are grown, extracted or otherwise exploited for large-scale consumption and private profit. The author uses historical analysis and current data, combined in crisp and clear prose, to demonstrate that globalization is not a new phenomenon but has been part of capitalism’s development since the beginning of the modern era.

The most disturbing chapter describes the trade in human beings and human body parts. Most of us think of the slave trade as a relic of the 19th century, but it is alive and well today. Children of both sexes and women of almost any age are sold into the global sex trade. Others are sold as household servants. In South Asia, young boys are sold to race camels for wealthy oil sheiks from the Persian Gulf. Within the United States alone, the State Department estimated that as many as 20,000 people were trafficked during a recent year. The stories of damaged and destroyed human lives are heart-wrenching. But the commodification of the human body is not confined to live human beings: Body parts, blood, cadavers, excrement and hair are sold for medical research and treatment, fertilizer and wigs around the world.

Ridgeway’s presentation is devastating, but he does not address the “So what?” question, apparently content to allow the facts to speak for themselves. Unfortunately, facts rarely speak absent an analytical and ethical framework. Consequently, the book approaches tedium as he reviews the trade in copper, tin, zinc, lead, iron, steel, manganese, chrome, nickel, cobalt, bauxite, magnesium, titanium, silver, gold and platinum. along with diamonds and other gemstones in the chapter on metals, approaching each topic with similar rigor. Despite this weakness, the book is a quick read and worth the effort. The chapters on fuels, fresh water and biodiversity are particularly interesting.

Through the book’s encyclopedic approach, Ridgeway shows the tendency of capitalism to engulf everything in its path. That is, a capitalist economy not only sweeps across national borders but it also commodifies everything in search of global resources and greater profits. Marx described this situation and its social consequences in Capital:

If now we picture to ourselves this feverish simultaneous agitation on the whole world market, it will be comprehensible how the growth accumulation and concentration of capital results in an uninterrupted division of labor, and in the application of new and the perfecting of old machinery precipitately and on an ever more gigantic scale. The greater division of labor enables one worker to do the work of five, ten or twenty; it therefore multiples competition among the workers fivefold, tenfold and twentyfold.

What the Facts Mean
The Wealth Inequality Reader picks up the story of growing concentration of wealth and increased competition between workers by focusing on the widening economic gap within the United States. Although many studies address inequality, few examine distribution of wealth rather than distribution of income. The results grab your attention: The wealthiest one percent of U.S. households own about one-third of the nation’s wealth; the next four percent owns an additional 25 percent; the bottom half of the population owns less than three percent of the wealth. The precise numbers change from year to year, but the basic shape of social structure remains the same. Not surprisingly, it’s worse for people of color and women, an analysis that is presented compellingly by authors Meizhu Lui, Betsy Leondar-Wright and Amy Gluckman.

A singular strength of the book is its combination of popular-education style presentation of economic data, United for a Fair Economy’s forte, with more academic analysis by both mainstream and radical thinkers. The first 20 pages consist of charts, graphs and cartoons presented in easy-to-digest fashion.

The book is also particularly good at identifying specific government policies that have contributed to the wealth gap. An insightful essay by UFE founder Chuck Collins outlines seven: declining purchasing power of the minimum wage; taxes on wages not wealth; anti-worker labor laws; destruction of the safety net; allowing runaway executive compensation; changing investment rules; and allowing poor corporate accounting. Not an invisible hand, but identifiable choices by policy makers are largely responsible for the economic challenges facing most U.S. families. Another essay by Collins outlines how conservatives developed and advanced the economic agenda that runs contrary to the public interest of the majority.

One more strength of the collection is the section on strategies for change. Suggestions range from changes in tax policy to building economic power at the community level, fighting predatory lending to promoting trade union organizing—policies that are practical and achievable (even in today’s reactionary political environment) with grassroots organizing. A final section looks to the future with more visionary—but not quixotic—proposals for our common economic future, and an appendix includes descriptions of various wealth-building strategies.

Thus, the book moves from concrete analysis of current conditions to proposing specific ameliorative social policies to envisioning a new set of social relationships. In this way, the book offers the most important lessons for activists who care about the economy: There are alternatives.

A weakness of the book that readers of this magazine may particularly notice of is its relative silence about military spending or the economic impact of war. One role that nonviolent activists might play in the growing national dialogue about economic policies and priorities is to offer that analysis and propose alternatives based on nonviolence. Several years ago, in the pages of this magazine, Joanne Sheehan and the late Chuck Matthei outlined the principles of nonviolent economics, particularly highlighting its understanding of stakeholders—an understanding that differs from the common understanding in capitalist economics.

Stakeholders
Today’s standard business model defines stakeholders as investors (shareholders), customers, and workers and/or managers. Progressive businesses extend that sphere to the community. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the businesses that caused the current scandal on Wall Street, like WorldCom, narrowed the sphere of stakeholders to upper management. In a system of nonviolent economics, economic activity must show equitable treatment for the widest range of stakeholders, including those mentioned above and even the natural environment.

The assessments in these two books mirror some of the most radical critiques of capitalism, yet the analysis and concerns they reflect are finding their way into establishment opinion. Conservative religious leaders and newspaper columnists have, not surprisingly, taken up the cause of stopping the sex trade. Others have raised powerful questions about the growing tendency to buy and sell everything. Last October 13, in the midst of the presidential campaign, The New York Times editorialized about the negative social effects of economic inequality, citing, among other statistics, that “during the Bush years, take-home pay, as a share of the economy, has fallen to its lowest level since 1929, when the government started keeping records. Corporate profits have grown faster—and wages and salaries far less—than in all eight recoveries since World War II.” The editorial concluded that policies and presidents matter, and that the current president has wronged U.S. workers.

Although The Times did not consider as many policy options as those outlined in The Wealth Inequality Reader, it did contribute to the robustness of the national and international conversation about equity and decency. Conditions are ripe for asking more profound and fundamental questions, and these two texts provide plenty of material to continue the debate.

Now based in Massachusetts, Chris Ney served on the WRL National Committee from 1990 to 1997 and on the national staff as Disarmament and Fundraising Coordinator from 1997 to 2001.