HOW TO CREATE A PEASANT CLASS

REEFER MADNESS AND OTHER TALES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, by Eric Schlosser
(Penguin, $37.95).

In the state of California, as nowhere else, visitors are liable to feel a
sense that America's social mobility has broken down: that there is one
class enjoying a thrilling, lively prosperity, and another destined only to
carry the bags and till the fields.

In Reefer Madness and Other Tales from the American Underground, Eric
Schlosser offers substantial empirical evidence to support the feeling. In
Los Angeles County, an estimated 28 percent of workers are paid in cash. A
burgeoning underground economy accounts for something between nine and 29
percent of the city's economic activity.

But it is in agriculture that the underground has most firmly taken hold.
Between 30 and 60 percent of the migrant workers in California's fields -
more than a million of them - are illegal immigrants; non-citizens,
untouched by civil society, lacking health care and, in some cases, even
homes to live in.

The underground is the setting of Schlosser's book, although the three
essays that comprise it don't quite achieve the consistency of theme that
he aspires to in his introduction. "Reefer Madness" (which first emerged as
a long magazine article about the war on drugs) and his story of the
American porn industry, "An Empire of the Obscene", are at heart about the
perverse outcomes of attempts to regulate private behaviour, but "In the
Strawberry Fields" is more in the territory of Schlosser's first book, Fast
Food Nation, in its examination of the unsavoury - and frequently illicit -
underpinnings of the American consumer food chain.

Like Fast Food Nation, this book is not a rant, and will come as a balm to
anyone feeling uneasy with the liberties taken by liberal superguy Michael
Moore in the name of, well, liberty. Schlosser's technique is calmly to
assemble the facts and leave the reader to conclude that something is
seriously wrong here.

He's hardly an ideologue, either. The book opens with a consideration of
The Wealth of Nations, and, just as Schlosser saw the early fast-food
entrepreneurs as in many ways admirable, so he seems to detect essentially
American virtues in the nimble and defiant career of millionaire porn king
Reuben Sturman.

Schlosser pursues his outwardly academic theme - "the proper limits of the
state and the proper limits on the free market" - as a journalist, using
real stories to track the boom in minimum sentences and other forms of
gimmick law associated with marijuana. The result: woeful inconsistency,
ludicrous punishments, poor outcomes and the alarming transfer of judicial
discretion to prosectors. And also - in a link with his essay on immigrant
labour - a substantial transfer of risk to those at the bottom of the
industry ladder.

He concludes (almost to his own surprise, you feel) that America's most
sound illicit-drug policy existed under the Nixon administration, and that
the Reaganite war on drugs reversed a declining trend in illegal drug use.
Why, Schlosser asks, has such weight of law been piled onto protecting
Americans from their private behaviour, when the most important safeguards
of life and liberty go unheeded on California's strawberry fields?

"This unwillingness to control corporate behaviour on moral grounds has
been accompanied . by a government crusade to judge, condemn and punish
individuals for their alleged moral failings. Certain things cannot be sold
because they are immoral, while other things - such as the exploitation of
illegal immigrants, their poverty and poor health - hardly raise a moral
qualm."

Meanwhile, the old porn king's elaborate systems for keeping the government
away from his business and his money seem "quaint and old-fashioned"
compared to the more recent practices of Enron Corporation, which was
washing money through nearly 900 foreign subsidiaries (two thirds of them
registered in the Cayman Islands) by the time it collapsed.

"In addition to influencing the accounting practices of corporate America,"
says Schlosser, "the underground has subsumed a wide range of economic
activities that used to occur in the mainstream. The sort of black-market
labour once narrowly confined to California agriculture is now widespread
in meatpacking, construction and garment manufacture."

Schlosser's ominous prediction that before long the US will have no need to
import a peasant class - it will have created its own - will have to be
tested by history. The September 11 attacks and subsequent
life-during-wartime in the US seem to have been shoehorned into the end of
the book, as if he couldn't bring himself not to mention them. But overall,
the meticulous and original Reefer Madness and Other Tales from the
American Underground elegantly draws the reader towards his personal
philosophy: "My own views tend toward a suspicion of all absolute theories
and a strong belief in thought that knows its own limits. I like the idea
of fewer laws, strictly enforced."