Book REVIEW / NONFICTION : Fighting a New Bogyman--a Nameless, Faceless System : OPPOSING THE SYSTEM by Charles A. Reich; Crown $23, 219 pages

Charles Reich’s “The Greening of America,” first published in 1970, was one of those rare books that captured and helped to define the spirit of its times. The very word greening became a kind of shorthand for the boisterous but humane values of the late ‘60s and pre-Watergate ‘70s, and Reich was seen as a gleeful guru of revolution and redemption.

No such light escapes the black hole of Reich’s new book, “Opposing the System.” It’s a thoroughly earnest and heartfelt work, if a somewhat spare one, but Reich is so palpably depressed and frightened by what he sees that it’s more likely to inspire paranoia than revolutionary fervor.

Reich, a Yale professor and lawyer by training, defines “the system” as the cause of all our problems, but he is talking about something different from the bogyman of so much ‘60s rhetoric. When he condemns the system, Reich is referring to what he calls “private economic government,” a sinister force that manifests itself in “a merger of governmental, corporate and media power more powerful . . . than any previously known form of rule.”

Indeed, Reich begins to sound a bit like a character from a Philip K. Dick novel when he conjures up a world in which faceless corporate minions driven by pure and impersonal greed make the only decisions that really count.

“The invisible system that governs us has no name,” he writes. “It has circumvented the Constitution, nullified democracy, and overridden the free market. It usurps our powers and dominates our lives. Yet we cannot see it or describe it. It is new to human history.”

Only rarely does Reich step down from his soapbox and speak in concrete terms--and only then do we begin to understand what he is so worked up about. He insists that “big government” and the “free market” and the “welfare state” are mostly myths; the real power, and thus the real problem, can be found in the boardrooms and corner offices of corporate America.

“Private economic government is a far more important factor in the lives of individuals than public government,” he writes. “In order to get a job, have a career, escape the abyss of being rejected or discarded, people will accept the dictates of corporate and institutional employers, even when these dictates go far beyond anything that public government could constitutionally impose.”

An employee who is desperate to get or keep a job, Reich points out, will submit to drug-testing, workplace surveillance, personal searches and censorship by the employer, all of which would be illegal if carried out by the government.

“Economic coercion,” he quips, “is violence in slow motion.”

Reich specifically calls for a revival of the spirit of protest that characterized the ‘60s as a way to “fight the system,” a phrase that summons up the crackling but directionless energy of the very era in which “The Greening of America” was a bestseller.

“The next stage of this drama must inevitably be the return of protest, of demonstrations and direct action,” Reich exhorts. “But this time, protest must find a way to be effective, to unite rather than divide, and to achieve a change of direction.”

Reich insists that we need “a new map of reality,” and he boldly takes it upon himself to give us one in “Opposing the System.” And yet Reich despairs over the loss of vision that once prompted us to feel so optimistic in the ‘60s. “We are all stumbling in the dark,” he broods. “We have lost the ability to imagine a better future.”

There’s an irony at work in Reich’s book. Precisely because so many Americans feel overwhelmed by the system, so frustrated at the impotence of our democracy, so uncertain about which way to jump, it’s hard to imagine that Reich’s book will prompt the populace to take to the streets in a stirring show of unity.

Reich calls on us to “fulfill our duty as human beings to choose the upward path.” But I could not help but feel that the reader who will respond most powerfully to Reich’s description of a vast conspiratorial machine that runs our lives is more likely to think in terms of train derailments and the bombings of government buildings than in peace marches and love-ins.