• Book Overview
• Table of Contents
• Excerpt
• Praise

Return to the book overview

“Vijay Prashad draws a compelling bottom-up picture of the American political economy today. He shows the mesh between the stressed economic situation of working people and our increasingly repressive social policies. And he also points to the kinds of movement struggles that might disrupt this fundamentalist neoliberal regime.”
—Frances Fox-Piven, author of Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way

"Elegant, lucid and incisive, Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses is an invaluable resource for political and intellectual challenges to captivity. Vijay Prashad's critique of globalization, local policing and warfare, and his mapping of resistance waged by women, the impoverished, the racialized, and incarcerated are fierce and fruitful."
—Joy James, editor of Imprisoned Intellectuals, author of Resisting State Violence

“Vijay Prashad’s Keeping Up With the Dow Joneses provides the complete package—a detailed account of the ways in which class, race, and gender inequality have played out in the United States over the last twenty years, how they are related and get played out in a wide range of policies, and how groups are collectively resisting these pressures. Wrapped around the story of growth in low-wage, contingent workforce and the opposition to these efforts, Prashad provides careful and useful documentation on growing greed at the top and debt at the bottom, the criminalization of poverty and the corresponding growth in for-profit prison industry, as well as the hell-bent intent to dissolve the safety net and force poor mothers into lousy jobs.”
—Randy Albelda, co-author of Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty and co-editor of Lost Ground: Welfare Reform, Poverty and Beyond

“Some people write eloquently. Some are wonderful researchers. Some think clearly, giving us new ideas with each new page. Vijay Prashad manages all three achievements, and does it with admirable passion, in his new book Keeping Up With The Dow Joneses. Essays on debt, prison, workfare, and movement struggle are all, in fact, really about how we can best understand our world in order to dramatically change it. It is a fine book belonging on every radical's bookshelf, and beyond.”
—Michael Albert, author of Parecon: Life After Capitalism

“Prashad expertly analyzes the linkages between globalization, racism, and the prison industrial complex. What is particularly noteworthy about this book is that it does not just describe the problems we face, but provides a wide range of creative strategies for tackling what seem to be overwhelming obstacles in the fight for social and economic justice. In addition, he highlights the organizing work of people of color, particularly women of color, whose contributions in anti-globalization work are generally marginalized by other scholars.”
—Andrea Smith, co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide