A Phoenix from the Ashes

RANDY BARBER used to have long hair. In patched overworn jeans he would trek form the green hills of Hanover to the SDS centers on the East Coast mustering support for the dying antiwar movement, organizing, demonstrating. He formed the Peoples Bicentennial Commission in an effort to remind Americans of their radical past, producing rushed superficial works like Voices of the American Revolution. He organized the Midnight Ride to Concord in April 1975.

Jeremy Rifkin followed a like pattern, moving from the South Side of Chicago religious background to the Wharton School of Finance to radical politics. Both showed a propensity to indulge in short term, demonstration-oriented politics. They sought to radicalize the nation by publishing Bantam pamphlets on the rights of Americans, by dredging up the most radical notions of our Founding Fathers (for small farms, against a standing army). But the days of Jefferson and Jackson were long over and the once infant country now grappled with the more complex issues of corporate dominance and the contradictions of capitalism. Radical faddism for all its short term benefits served more to fuel the conservative backlash than accomplish any real change.

Today, Barber sports a short haircut; his dress is conservative; his circuit, lectures. the Peoples Bicentennial Commission is now the Peoples Business Commission; more sophisticated economic arguments have replaced the shallow demonstration-oriented approach. And for the first time Barber and Rifkin offer more than just a passing look at events and issues. They retain the mass appeal outlook--their book went directly into paperback, their language is lively, and their ideas vividly expressed. But the end product is not a fleeting rehash of old ideas presented in a new way. Instead The North Will Rise Again offers carefully thought-out alternatives to the status quo.

Kirkpatric Sales' Power Shift three years ago outlined the conflict developing between the North and the South over capital investment--the runaway shop, the declining Northeast industrial corridor, the advantages for corporation investment in the Sunbelt such as room to expand, right to work laws, and limited unionization. Rifkin and Barber, taking the inevitable scenario for their base, analyze the reasons behind declining union membership, the anti-northeast corporate strategy and the failures of the business unionism to address these issue, and introduce a new factor--social capital in pension funds.

The two authors present a convincing argument for a radical new view of pensions as not simply the deferred income of millions of hard working Americans, but a source of power and welath that could provide the solution to the capital squeeze facing the Graybelt. Pension assets, they point out, now constitute the largest single pool of capital in the world--over $500 billion. But this pool is almost solely controlled by the bankers and brokers who send it to the Sunbelt and to Taiwan. Because pensions are basically propping up the stock market--because the Fortune 500 are using those assets to contribute to the decline of the Northeast more burdensome state taxes--the authors suggest that the system is forcing the workers to contribute to their own undoing.

They present a strong argument for a workable solution--the return of control over pensions to the real owners of the capital and the implementation of an alternative economic base independent of the private-capital sector.

The book explains the various kinds of pension funds (corporate funds, collectively-bargained funds, public employee funds, funds for the self-employed), the legal issues over their control and use, and the pension investment strategies that the bankers and brokers have used. The main strength of the book is its detailed documentation of economic trends, quoting labor, Congressional and industrial leaders and analysts to add color to what could have been a very bleak subject.Even if Rifkin and Barber's next book, on the economic significance of the evangelical movement in the U.S., denotes a return to radical faddism, The North Will Rise Again will stand.