Workin' on the Chain Gang : Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History (Library of Contemporary Thought)

Rating:
Summary: Down with Capitalism!
Review: 'We [the working class] are marginalized by the profit of capitalism. We are footnotes to Citibank and the Mobil Oil Corporation and Chiquita Brands International (once know as the United Fruit Company).' --Walter Mosely

Because I have read and advocated the analysis, ideas, and visions of Jesus, Karl Marx, Fedel Castro, Dorothy Day, Kwame Nkrumah, Rosa Luxanburg, and Mother Jones, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and Paulo Friere, and many others, I didn't find much new in this work by Walter Mosley. However, it was refreshing to see a fiction writer with skill, talent, and insight, attempt to give a piece of his mind in an honest, direct way.

I'm not sure how people who are fans of Mosley's best selling fictional works will read this, his first non-fiction book. But I would suggest that despite its brevity and lack of development, this book would make a great book club discussion. It's packed with enough insight and ideas for contemporary political thought that it might indeed lead readers to ponder life beyond their American Dream homes, automobiles, household gadgets, and Kodak moments.

Mosely makes sharp criticism of an American capitalist society which essentially puts profits before people and consumption before real needs. Thus, while people starve and receive medical care in this the richest country in the world, 5% of the population holds at least half the wealth in the country. There are people in this country who make say $5000 an hour when they go to work, while the rest of the population gets by on two-family incomes, over-time hours, and two-jobs salaries. And this says nothing about the poorest parts of the world where a bar of soap and toothpaste are luxury items.

As Mosely reminds us, 'We know how much money every armed bandit has stolen from banks but almost nothing about how much the banks have stolen from us. We are told, during the commercial, how much some piece of clothing costs, but the returning anchor refrains from telling us what economic havoc we have caused in the third world by paying slave wages to local workers to make the price attractive [and profitable].'

Mosely attempts to give his view of an ideal system that would replace capitalism. But here he falls short. He regrets the doesn't 'know the exact steps that need to be taken to free us from our entanglements.' He's not even sure it's possible. But when tries to say that 'everyone has a right to a living wage, a right to competent medical care, and a share in the natural resources that the nation either owns or creates,' he sounds to me, as I understand it, like he's a calling for a socialist system--though he dismisses early on in his book Marxism and communism as failed ideologies. That's too bad. For I think if he had put more thought into a socialist transformation of society, he could have provided his readers with more to think about.

Instead, he suggest that readers contemplate their visions for a better world. But I bet when people do that, it will simply sound more like individualistic, capitalist visions of society. It's not that we shouldn't contemplate our own visions, but I suggest that it's not that we, as Mosely suggest, need to make a list of 'what it is that you deserve for a lifetime of labor,' but that we need to involve ourselves in a process of political education. We need political reading groups in our places of worship, our colleges, communities, and places of employment. As we politically educate ourselves, we can begin to ask ourselves what could I do with other in an organized manner to work for what I think is just and right.

This political education process could begin with Mosely work.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning
Review: I am about half-way through reading this book. I am stunned. I am encountering the observations and thoughts that I have been trying to graple with for several years now. And here they are in a well thought out, articulate, literate book.

I am recommending this book to a lot of friends and family.

I recommend it to you.

Rating:
Summary: Unrecognized genius
Review: I believe that Walter Mosley is the greatest author I have ever read. That is no small feat. His works of fiction paint a picture so vivid, I find myself believing and becoming his characters.

Workin' on the chain gang is a different story. This book has changed my way of thinking. Mosley references to the human's quick judgement i.e. the blue car, the dead tree. This is what causes most of our problems with other people.

I now see that the "people" I see everyday, are not limited to their physical frames. That is not really them at all. They are a consciousness that is so deeply rooted, that they themselves may not be fully aware of it.

This book should be read to children everywhere and taught in every school. To let this genius go unnoticed would be a travesty.

Rating:
Summary: Unrecognized genius
Review: I believe that Walter Mosley is the greatest author I have ever read. That is no small feat. His works of fiction paint a picture so vivid, I find myself believing and becoming his characters.

Workin' on the chain gang is a different story. This book has changed my way of thinking. Mosley references to the human's quick judgement i.e. the blue car, the dead tree. This is what causes most of our problems with other people.

I now see that the "people" I see everyday, are not limited to their physical frames. That is not really them at all. They are a consciousness that is so deeply rooted, that they themselves may not be fully aware of it.

This book should be read to children everywhere and taught in every school. To let this genius go unnoticed would be a travesty.

Rating:
Summary: A half-handed attempt at sociology
Review: I like Mosley's work, period. Except this. If you've read any Cornel West or Manning Marable, you've already been on this territory before, and seen it done better. Mosley strolls along, picking through whatever happens to catch his eye in the newspaper, it seems, and levels personal comment on it. Okay, but is it interesting? Not to me...and I CARE about the issues he discusses. I live them. The book just didn't tell me anything I didn't know, and you get the feeling he already knows this when you read it.

Rating:
Summary: brilliant
Review: I've been enjoying the author's fiction career for some time. With Always Outnumbered,Always Outgunned, I started to think he was becoming one of the great writers of our century. When he branched out from his original genre to speculative fiction with Blue Light my respect grew.

This non-fiction analysis of our current life has little to do with the problems of 'race'. As in his fiction, it has to do with the problems and solutions of humans imbedded in an inhumane system.

I belive the 21st century equivalent to Luthers manifesto to the ruling church will be a team effort. Walter Mosley is a member in good standing in that team.

I suggest reading Birth of the Chaordic Age by Dee W. Hock in close proximity to this book. Members of the team come from all races and classes.

Vivez la revolution! Vivez l'humanite!

Rating:
Summary: Down with Capitalism!
Review: �We [the working class] are marginalized by the profit of capitalism. We are footnotes to Citibank and the Mobil Oil Corporation and Chiquita Brands International (once know as the United Fruit Company).� --Walter Mosely

Because I have read and advocated the analysis, ideas, and visions of Jesus, Karl Marx, Fedel Castro, Dorothy Day, Kwame Nkrumah, Rosa Luxanburg, and Mother Jones, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and Paulo Friere, and many others, I didn�t find much new in this work by Walter Mosley. However, it was refreshing to see a fiction writer with skill, talent, and insight, attempt to give a piece of his mind in an honest, direct way.

I�m not sure how people who are fans of Mosley�s best selling fictional works will read this, his first non-fiction book. But I would suggest that despite its brevity and lack of development, this book would make a great book club discussion. It�s packed with enough insight and ideas for contemporary political thought that it might indeed lead readers to ponder life beyond their American Dream homes, automobiles, household gadgets, and Kodak moments.

Mosely makes sharp criticism of an American capitalist society which essentially puts profits before people and consumption before real needs. Thus, while people starve and receive medical care in this the richest country in the world, 5% of the population holds at least half the wealth in the country. There are people in this country who make say $5000 an hour when they go to work, while the rest of the population gets by on two-family incomes, over-time hours, and two-jobs salaries. And this says nothing about the poorest parts of the world where a bar of soap and toothpaste are luxury items.

As Mosely reminds us, �We know how much money every armed bandit has stolen from banks but almost nothing about how much the banks have stolen from us. We are told, during the commercial, how much some piece of clothing costs, but the returning anchor refrains from telling us what economic havoc we have caused in the third world by paying slave wages to local workers to make the price attractive [and profitable].�

Mosely attempts to give his view of an ideal system that would replace capitalism. But here he falls short. He regrets the doesn�t �know the exact steps that need to be taken to free us from our entanglements.� He�s not even sure it�s possible. But when tries to say that �everyone has a right to a living wage, a right to competent medical care, and a share in the natural resources that the nation either owns or creates,� he sounds to me, as I understand it, like he�s a calling for a socialist system--though he dismisses early on in his book Marxism and communism as failed ideologies. That�s too bad. For I think if he had put more thought into a socialist transformation of society, he could have provided his readers with more to think about.

Instead, he suggest that readers contemplate their visions for a better world. But I bet when people do that, it will simply sound more like individualistic, capitalist visions of society. It�s not that we shouldn�t contemplate our own visions, but I suggest that it�s not that we, as Mosely suggest, need to make a list of �what it is that you deserve for a lifetime of labor,� but that we need to involve ourselves in a process of political education. We need political reading groups in our places of worship, our colleges, communities, and places of employment. As we politically educate ourselves, we can begin to ask ourselves what could I do with other in an organized manner to work for what I think is just and right.

This political education process could begin with Mosely work.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Analysis of Modern American Life
Review: Once again, Walter Mosley pitches a great game. This book may be light in physical weight, but it is full of heavy thinking.

Mosley examines modern American culture in a way that probably seems heretical to most Americans. Mosley asks his readers to do things most people would never seriously (I mean really seriously) consider.

The light stuff includes viewing people as individuals, not skin colors. Getting to know someone before passing mental judgement on them. Treating everyone with respect, until a person gives you reason to do otherwise. Ensuring all the elderly and all children have adequate food and medical care. Yeah, everyone's with Mosley on those ideas; if not deep inside, at least the majority of Americans realize that is the way it should be.

However, can you name three close friends or family members whom you could convince to give up all television for three months? How about a season's moritorium from sporting events and sports news? While you're at it, locate a group of friends also willing to forgo other forms of LCD (lowest common denominator) entertainment.

If you find it easy to contemplate abandoning those activities, Mosley has another suggestion for you. Let's dump capitalism as a way of life, as a staple of American society. There, are you still with me? Your job is slowly killing you. Going to work daily is like going to the plantation, except the whip has been replaced with credit card debt . . . that is, if you're lucky enough to have a credit card. By eagerly participating in the world as it is, you are no less brainwashed and perversly dependent than a woman who stays with a physically abusive man.

Perhaps even more amazing than the fact that Mosley considers and suggests such actions, is that he presents a convincing argument for all of his suggestions. You may not always agree with Mosley (though I did), but he always presents a logical line of thinking.

Once again, Mosley has produced a book that I am recommending to everyone I know. So far, Mosley is pitching a perfect game.

Rating:
Summary: Picking up, were Huey left off.
Review: Simply put, Mr. Mosley in plain English has been able to describe the true essence of capitalism. Much in the same way Huey P. Newton explained communism.... for the streets. Mr. Mosley is no sociologist, which is why we can understand what he means. From one observer to the next, I recommend this book to everyone in America and the world, to under stand what "role" we play in this day and age.

Rating:
Summary: putting the chains back on
Review: This short, but overlong, book, which (God help us) comes from something called the Library of Contemporary Thought, offers pulp fiction writer Walter Mosley the opportunity to share his opinion on how to reform America culture and politics. Sadly, he proceeds to embarrass himself utterly. The chain gang of the title is his completely inapt metaphor for modern economic life. Imagine the disdain with which folks like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, and other genuine heroes of the fight for civil rights for blacks would greet Mosely's bizarre assertion that we are all enslaved in modern America : Everywhere I look I see chains, from the planned obsolescence that binds us to an endless line of ever more useless machines to captivating television shows about nothing to the value of the dollar bills insecurely nestled at the bottom of my pocket. For hundreds of years, Africans (an estimated 10 million) were captured, chained and sold; taken by force to America in the festering bowels of transport ships; sold again and enslaved by white masters; denied all rights and freedoms; forced to work from cradle to grave; beaten; raped; murdered; their families split apart on a whim. This entire system is a stinking blot upon the nation's honor, one which whites had a chance to expunge with the bloodshed and destruction of the Civil War, but which was immediately replenished when frightened and embittered Southerners, with the willing acquiescence of their Northern countrymen, imposed a system of apartheid on the newly freed black population. This time, the outrage of Jim Crow persisted until blacks themselves, in an awe inspiring display of moral and physical courage, used peaceful civil disobedience to shame white America into finally giving them the equal rights they'd long been promised. How can anyone compare this legacy of genuine and horrifying oppression to such trivial matters as overconsumption of appliances and watching too much Seinfeld ? Mosley actually has the temerity at one point to say that : "There is an echo of Jim Crow in the HMO..." One needn't love HMOs to recognize the difference between a mostly successful effort to provide cheap health care, on the one hand, and, on the other, the systematic and official enforcement of political and economic discrimination against an entire segment of the population based solely on the color of their skin. The effort to equate the two is so absurd as not to deserve to be taken seriously. Equally unserious is Mosely's prescription for what should be done to free us from the bondage of capitalism : (1) Take a self-imposed break from electronic media (though for some reason print media is allowed) (2) Tell the truth once a day. (3) Make a list of the things you demand from the system. Please... By the time he gets to his presidential platform you're unsure whether the whole book isn't just an elaborate hoax. Here's what he proposes : educate children; take care of the aged; pay doctors' medical malpractice premiums; educate more doctors and nurses; either legalize drugs or stop their importation into the country; have a conference on capital punishment; create rights to a living wage, health care, and an equal share in the Gross Domestic Product; and enter into international agreements to assure the same to all foreign workers too. As a candidate he would be some kind of weird melding of Bill Clinton, proposing only programs that everyone supports, and Lenin, reintroducing socialism. What's most surprising, or maybe not, about all of this, is that the radical egalitarianism that he envisions would essentially return him, and the rest of us, to the plantation. He calls it utopian, but at every step his politics requires that the freedom of some be curtailed in order to benefit others. In his great autobiography, Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington talks about the terror with which many newly freed blacks faced the prospect of freedom, after the Civil War. A people who had been completely, though involuntarily, dependent on the largesse of their masters was suddenly thrust out into the world and told to fend for themselves. How could this not have been frightening ? And, indeed, freedom, in the words of the old 60s slogan, isn't free. It requires that each of us take responsibility for ourselves and inevitably some will do better than others. But it is deeply discouraging that, some 150 years later--after a 20th Century in which his ideas were already tested and found to lead not to Utopia but to the Gulag--at least one of their descendants is no more prepared to leave the plantation than they were. There's a scene at the end of the movie version of Devil in a Blue Dress that is one of the most ineffably poignant in all of film. Ezekiel Rawlins (Denzel Washington) is standing in the street in front of his house, just looking around his middle class neighborhood. The viewer is achingly aware that where the scene depicts nuclear families, homeowners, workers, a people whose great achievement is to have survived all that the white man tried doing to them and to have built this community in the face of those odds, in just a few short years that was all destroyed by the presumably well-intentioned replacement of the ideal of self-reliance by a system of Big Government paternalism. You can't help but wonder if that community might have continued to thrive if they'd simply been left to themselves, rather than being submitted to the Great Society. What a high price was paid when freedom, however challenging, was replaced by security. Apparently, Mosley believes it's worth paying again. I beg to differ. GRADE : F