WORKIN' ON THE CHAIN GANG

            An eloquent if clichéd essay on black and white Americans’ slavery to the economy.

            Mosley has evolved from the chronicler of detective Easy Rawlins to a short story writer (Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 1997) and a significant African-American thinker (Black Genius, 1999).  His thesis in this manifesto is not Marxist, but it borrows a figure from Marx:  All members of our corporate-consumer society are linked by chains.  Blacks may tend to be at the back of that chain gang, but the slavery and racism they endured is a metaphor for the chains that “restrain us all.”  The man in the suit keeps us all down.  Hence Mosley declines to celebrate technical progress at the millennium, noting by contrast how little progress the civil rights movement made from the era of the steamship to our first manned space launches.  Instead of celebrating the millennium, Mosley urges readers to “mourn the passage of that thousand years,” focusing on the genocide and starving children that are still here.  Instead of technology, the “torch” of black history will lead us out of the darkness, and the “chemotherapy” of harsh truth will set us free.  The remaining three points to Mosley’s five-part program include self-realization, breaking the idol of profit margin, and radically redrawing a new Presidential platform.  Throughout, the best ideas read like a list of Progressivism’s Greatest Hits.  Man seems free, but is everywhere in chains; the railroad rides upon us; we must take a break from consumption, the distractions of the mass media, and empowering our employers.  Observations about the “plantation without chains” and notes on why the caged bird sings would have been more effective 40 years ago.  No bombast is likely to convince readers that a welfare state like Sweden is superior to the US, or that curing AIDS is morally equivalent to curing cancer.

            Even when his rhetoric is trite, however, Mosley is always engaged and engaging.