TI-IE WORLD, THE FREE MARKET AND THE LEFT 37 housing reduces workers1 insecurity and increases their productivity, thereby strengthening their relative position in the labor market. But workers must rely on their own united efforts to attain even this minimum degree of labor market leverage as well as to push beyond, toward higher living standards, more security and better working conditions. Unionism is in eclipse in Western countries and under attack virtually everywhere. Union strength will continue to erode as long as multinational firms are increasingly able to pit workers in one region or country against those in others. Thus, in the contemporary world more than ever, Marx's call for workers of the world to unite is no mere slogan; it is practical necessity. Socialize information. Marx wrote that capitalism 'fetishizes* commodities—meaning that in market arrangements the social conditions under which commodities are produced are obscured as consumers attach interest only to the commodities themselves and their price. As Elson stresses, a socialized market would require democratic institutions to lift the market's informational shroud: to disseminate systematically information about the processes that shape our lives and environment and that produce and distribute commodities. People who eat Perdue chickens, for example, not only should know the chicken's price; they should know that the price reflects Perdue's antilabor practices—a high proportion of workers receiving minimum wages, no benefits and suffering from repetitive-motion illnesses due to speedups—as well as brutishness toward animals. Similarly, corporations' lying campaigns portraying their ecological commitment can be opposed successfully only through increased public consciousness of the effects of how we produce and consume. To the extent that capitalists can suppress this sort of information, they can manipulate our decision making as consumers, gutting the idea, so appreciated by free-market economists, of 'consumer sovereignty.' In the context of a vibrant left movement, access to heretofore hidden information can be a powerful tool for restraining the market's destructive tendencies. It will be central, for example, in furthering a coalition between labor organizers and environmentalists, since such a coalition will depend on the ability to map environmental strategies that do not simultaneously diminish workers' already eroding rights and living standards. Considered in themselves, the ideas of socializing investment, the labor market and information are hardly earth shattering. All have been practiced with varying degrees of commitment and success in virtually every country. In a capitalist context, Japan and South Korea have become economic icons through their governments' strong involvement in major investment decisions. The boycott and sanctions movement against apartheid shows what an informed and aroused citizenry can effect; so, for that matter, does the dramatic change in attitudes toward smoking. The conditions enjoyed by workers in Sweden