Chaos or Community: Seeking Solutions, Not Scapegoats for Bad Economics.

• Author: Buell, John

Holly Sklar's provocative new book goes well beyond a narrow analysis of economic inequality in America. She not only marshals the numbers; she also dismantles the conservative apologies for this sorry state of affairs. Along the way, she provides a sophisticated understanding of the social and ideological roots of the current political crisis, and she offers a compelling approach to our political renewal.

Sklar begins with a familiar, albeit disturbing, recapitulation of data on inequality, noting that the top 1 percent of the social pyramid now controls wealth equal to that of the bottom 95 percent. She also points out that the poverty line itself is based on outdated assumptions about the cost of housing and other necessities; she estimates that the poor now amount to nearly 25 percent of the population, far above the official rate of 15 percent. And she notes that the minimum wage has shrunk by 25 percent in real terms since 1975.

These burgeoning inequalities are one consequence of the retreat from traditional New Deal liberalism, she says. For instance, the corporate and governmental assault on unions has removed one of the most effective tools for increasing working-class wages.

Sklar is, however, far from being a nostalgic advocate of New Deal liberalism. Even at their best, minimum-wage laws, redistributive taxes, and business-oriented unionism were modern forms of noblesse oblige that left most citizens with little real power over their communities or workplaces.

While employees of many large corporations in the 1950s and 1960s were granted a somewhat more generous share of corporate income, liberalism has always left unchallenged most aspects of management's control of the production process. These gaps have come back to haunt liberals.

Sklar points out that contemporary liberal trade policy assumes that "the role of national and international government is to regulate the movement of labor, not capital." Corporations have increasingly taken advantage of this freedom by relocating some plants in nonunion, low-wage havens and asserting ever more control over the day-to-day operations of the domestic workplace. Factories and offices became more hierarchical and bureaucratic, jobs were made more narrow, employees were treated as expendable cogs in a machine, and working hours were stretched. Short-term profits soared, but at the expense of a work force that became increasingly disgusted with its treatment.

Corporate willingness to...