Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History, Walter Mosley (Ballantine, 2000)

Walter Mosley, the award-winning African-American writer and director of the Africana Studies Institute at New York University, is probably best-known for his mystery novels starring private detective Easy Rawlins. One of his later characters, a favorite of mine, is Socrates, an ex- con who after 40 years in prison re-enters society, and provides the reader with a compelling way to experience the social injustices of our society. Socrates is particularly interesting as the unlikely figure to embody the morals and values inherent in a just community -- I thought of Socrates as a "moral lighthouse" of sorts while reading Mosley's most recent mystery, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.

However, while I highly recommend anything written by Mosley, the book I review here is an essay that Mosely was asked to write for the millennium. He initially thought he would approach the essay in terms of race and its position in our society at the millennium, but he shifted this focus to something broader. Mosely purports that "the restraints of capitalism" are the true chains of our society. He asserts that "capitalism applies value systems to everything," but that these value systems are not morally or socially just: "capitalism has no humanity," he states. Mosely bases his argument on the capitalist notion that every person is a unit of labor, and in the small amount of free time that people do have, they spend that time in the chains of "spectacles and illusions"-the shallow consumerism of TV, sports, magazines, movies, even things like a "mud-slinging election or a grisly string of murders" add to the "subsequent pacification" and restraint of the masses.

Mosley states that in order to break these chains, we must resolve the issues he describes. He outlines five approaches to achieve this:

1. History: We are not learning from our own history and we need to. He particularly suggests that we should examine the Black experience within history to inform our future choices.
2. Truth: People spend more time avoiding the truth than telling or living it. He suggests that we look to truth as a measure of our commitment to growth.
3. Man in the mirror: We don't take a deep look at who we really are. Mosley asks that we question our assumptions regularly.
4. Margin of profit: We must define this great enemy. "For profit we will overlook murder and rape and genocide. For profit we will accept apartheid, slavery, and even total anarchy in isolated instances. For profit we will enslave our own people..." Mosley says that we are the margins of profit because the profit to this country comes from our labor. Thus, he says, "we are marginalized by the profit of capitalism."
5. Platform for presidency: Mosley's platform includes immediate concerns and future concerns. Immediate concerns include things like educating children, providing welfare for the aged, improving health care, finding better solutions for issues of drug trafficking and abuse, removing capital punishment, reworking affirmative action so that it includes all people, and instituting a foreign policy on an international right to good life. Mosley's future concerns center on extending the life-span of humans.

Much of this essay was difficult to read. It hits you over the head, and it gets at the core of our society's ills: that they are in fact rooted in our humanity, in our values, and in our morals. We choose consumerism and profit over social justice. Much of the essay left me feeling helpless and cynical. Indeed, Mosley points out that it's easy to complain about how much is wrong, and he points out that it is difficult to begin to make change when so many of our challenges are embedded in years of the systemic politics of capitalism. But Mosley does address the "what can we do about this" question by providing the reader with some "pedestrian suggestions for change"-small, individual acts that each of us can in fact do in order to begin the revolution needed to make our world a better place:

1. Make lists of what you think you deserve for a lifetime of labor, tinker with the list, change it, share it with anyone who will listen, make decisions based on your list, vote by your list.
2. Question critically. Mosely not only asks us to question people and the media around us but to ask ourselves hard questions as well.
3. See your neighbor: Know his or her name, find out what their interests are, ask after their health.
4. Personal enlightenment: "The goals of revolution are realized by personal enlightenment." We must each define what life we want to live ourselves, not borrow someone else's ideals.

Mosley's challenge to us is to "build a world where progress is for everyone and ownership is for us all... that our citizens should have equal access to the advantages that we discover." I believe that if we all strive to live in the world more like Mosley suggests, then we would be on our way to breaking the chains and shaking off the dead hand of our history.

Marie Cora is a Staff Development Specialist for SABES and editor of Adventures in Assessment, an annual journal by and for adult education practitioners. She can be reached at 617-482-9485 or at mcora@worlded.org