Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy

by Benjamin R. Barber
Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy

by Benjamin R. Barber

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Overview

Jihad vs. McWorld is a groundbreaking work, an elegant and illuminating analysis of the central conflict of our times: consumerist capitalism versus religious and tribal fundamentalism. These diametrically opposed but strangely intertwined forces are tearing apart--and bringing together--the world as we know it, undermining democracy and the nation-state on which it depends.

On the one hand, consumer capitalism on the global level is rapidly dissolving the social and economic barriers between nations, transforming the world's diverse populations into a blandly uniform market. On the other hand, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds are fragmenting the political landscape into smaller and smaller tribal units. Jihad vs. McWorld is the term that distinguished writer and political scientist Benjamin R. Barber has coined to describe the powerful and paradoxical interdependence of these forces. In this important new book, he explores the alarming repercussions of this potent dialectic for democracy.

A work of persuasive originality and penetrating insight, Jihad vs. McWorld holds up a sharp, clear lens to the dangerous chaos of the post-Cold War world. Critics and political leaders have already heralded Benjamin R. Barber's work for its bold vision and moral courage. Jihad vs. McWorld is an essential text for anyone who wants to understand our troubled present and the crisis threatening our future.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307874443
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 04/21/2010
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 432
Sales rank: 767,855
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Benjamin Barber was an internationally renowned political theorist, the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York City. He died in 2017.

Read an Excerpt

1
 
The Old Economy and the
Birth of a New McWorld
 
GILLETTE’S CHAIRMAN Alfred M. Zeien has said “I do not find foreign countries foreign.” Welcome to McWorld. There is no activity more intrinsically globalizing than trade, no ideology less interested in nations than capitalism, no challenge to frontiers more audacious than the market. By many measures, corporations are today more central players in global affairs than nations. We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as transnational or postnational or even antinational. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space. Their customers are not citizens of a particular nation or members of a parochial clan: they belong to the universal tribe of consumers defined by needs and wants that are ubiquitous, if not by nature then by the cunning of advertising. A consumer is a consumer is a consumer.
 
McDonald’s serves 20 million customers around the world every day, drawing more customers daily than there are people in Greece, Ireland, and Switzerland together. General Motors (still the world’s largest company despite its uneven recent sales history) employs more people internationally than live in a number of the world’s smaller nations. With $2.4 billion worth of pizzas sold in 1991, the privately owned Domino’s earned enough revenues to fund the collective government expenditures of Senegal, Uganda, Bolivia, and Iceland. Toshiba, the General Electric of Japan, boasts in its 1992 annual report that “as good corporate citizens” they “do our part to ensure that progress continues within the world community,” but its citizenship—whether Japanese or global—is hemmed in on every side by limits set by the demands of profitability, which in turn is driven by sales in 1992 of $25 billion, only slightly less than Argentina’s recent government budget. Globalism is mandated by profit not citizenship. Fast food goes upscale in the chic new chain Planet Hollywood. And “On planet Reebok,” according to the successful ad campaign of an only nominally “American” athletic shoe company, “there are no boundaries.” Ralph Lauren’s perfume for men, Safari, also boasted of “Living Without Boundaries” in its launch campaign in 1992.
 
A popular protectionist sticker appearing across the nation on American automobile bumpers reads “Real Americans Buy American.” The trouble is, it is hard to know which car is really more “American”: the Chevy built in Mexico from primarily imported parts and then reimported into the United States, the Ford built in German plants employing Turkish workers and sold on the Hong Kong and Nigerian markets, or the Toyota Camry designed by American Peter J. Hill at Toyota’s Newport Beach California Calty Design Research Center, assembled at the Georgetown, Kentucky, Toyota plant by American workers, primarily from American-made parts, and test-driven at Toyota’s twelve-thousand-acre Arizona proving ground.7 These international “Japanese” cars are puzzling: for to remain truly Japanese, the whole must somehow become more than its American parts. Thus, in a fit of schizophrenic self-congratulation, Honda has been boasting about its “made-in-America” roots (that is, parts) even as it revels in its status as Motor Trend’s “Import of the Year.”
 
So confusing has the question of automotive genealogy become that the United States government enacted an American Automobile Labeling Act that since October 1, 1994, has required that labels be affixed to new autos specifying their “domestic content,” from their engines to their windshield wipers. The labels are unlikely to clarify the situation, however, since they reveal (to take just one example) that Chrysler Corporation’s Dodge Stealth is built by Mitsubishi in Nagoya, Japan, while Mitsubishi’s Eclipse RS is built in Normal, Illinois, and features Chrysler engines.8 Labels can be confusing: the Nissan Altima assembled in America with mostly American parts does utilize radiator hoses manufactured in Paris … Paris, Tennessee.
 
The authors of the North American Free Trade Agreement found it particularly cumbersome to decide which products could qualify for tariff-free status in the new zone since so many products “foreign” to North America were nonetheless assembled in the region with local parts. How about Japanese picture tubes installed in Mexican television chassis? Under traditional trade rules they were “domestic;” under NAFTA rules, the picture tubes and electron guns will also have to be domestic to qualify. But since Japanese companies own large shares of both of the “American” glass companies that manufacture tubes, “American” domestic television sets will still be substantially Japanese, even if they qualify as American under NAFTA rules.10 American-made cars will have to have 50 percent of their parts (by value) as well as 50 percent of their labor contributed domestically (rising to 62.5 percent in 2002) but does this really make the cars “American”? Putting identity labels on products turns out to be even more challenging than establishing ethnic identities for people, for products have to be disassembled and labeled part by part by part, by origin of material, nationality of labor force, and cultural identity of designer to arrive at an ad absurdum conclusion about their ethnic identity.
 
Historically, there is something prototypically American about the automobile: Henry Ford’s commitment to a mass-produced motorized vehicle that would set every American family free has come to be associated with many of the virtues of American lifestyle and not a few of its vices. The internationalization of automobile culture—what George Ball once called “an ideology on four wheels”—as well as of automobile manufacturing is thus actually a globalization of America, no matter who is making the cars. The Chinese have recently committed to automobile manufacture as a foundation for economic modernization: more than any other decision they have made, this one may commit them to the Americanization they most fear.
 
Yet however American cars are in concept, they are hardly American in their manufacture whether measured by parts, design, or even labor. Indeed, increasingly, corporations refuse to define themselves by reference to labor at all, let alone by reference to a particular parochial labor force with a local national character. Ignacio Ramonet argues that in the global economy neither capital nor work nor material is the determining factor, but rather the “optimal relationship between these three,” which pushes us into the world of information, communication, and administration where traditional nation-states can exert little control and are bound to feel more and more uncomfortable.13 Robert Kuttner reports that the state-of-the-art handle for the postindustrial company—which clearly is also the post—nation-state company—is “the virtual corporation” where “the company is no longer a physical entity with a stable mission or location, but a shifting set of temporary relationships connected by computer network, phone and fax.”
 
McWorld is a kind of virtual reality, created by invisible but omnipotent high-tech information networks and fluid transnational economic markets, so the virtual corporation is not just a provocative turn of phrase. Without even trying, reporter Julie Edelson Halpert gives it concrete meaning in the portrait she draws of Ford Motor Company’s Mondeo project:
 
Seeking to shave months and millions of dollars from car design, Ford has consolidated management of its European, North American and Asian design operations into a single international network using powerful work stations based on Silicon Graphics Inc. technology linked by Ethernet networking software.
 
…The Ford system … was brought under a single “electronic roof” … based in Dearborn, Michigan. The other main sites on the network are in Dunton, England; Cologne, Germany; Turin, Italy; Valencia, California; Hiroshima, Japan; and Melbourne, Australia. The circuits—satellite links, undersea cables and land lines—are pur chased from telecommunications carriers.
 
The virtual corporation also exists in the labor market as an employer of “virtual” rather than actual laborers. The ideal virtual laborer is a robot: an interactive, “intelligent,” fully programmed worker capable of working twenty-four hours a day with no sustenance and minimal upkeep. What a poignant marriage: in McWorld’s chilly new cyberspace, yesterday’s invisible hand reaches out to grasp the invisible body of tomorrow’s newly born virtual corporation to guide its spasmodic newborn movements toward an eternity of profits, almost entirely without the intervention of a visible human hand.
 
Many modern nation-states have generated national industrial policies aimed at strategic coordination of economic policy and domination of international markets by their business corporations on the theory that the nation’s citizens will somehow be benefited by supporting corporations even if corporations decline to return the favor. Yet although full employment is a public good, it is not a corporate good. Business efficiency dictates downsizing, which means capital-intensive production, and capital-intensive production means labor-minimizing job policies. Translated into English this means firing as many permanent workers as possible and eliminating their costly benefit and pension packages. In their place appear machines, robots, and multiplying (so-called) “temporary” jobs, which are actually long-term jobs without long-term contracts, long-term security, or long-term benefits. Unemployment may eventually weaken the market by debilitating potential consumers (you can’t buy unless you earn), but corporations taken one by one are necessarily rabid competitors with (at most) a quarterly earnings horizon. They must be “lean and mean” to prevail. The “fat” here is workers and a corporate diet spells permanent “structural” unemployment for increasing numbers of workers.
 
American agriculture remains a dominant producer for world markets, but where once it took 80 percent of the workforce to grow crops, today it takes 2 percent. Manufacturing is following agriculture. IBM sloughed off labor fat to the tune of sixty thousand workers in 1993 to the general applause of market analysts, and it secured private advantages in the international computer market whose public costs will not be seen for several years and whose consequences will in any case not be directly borne by IBM.17 Nineteen ninety-three was the year of “downsizing” (a euphemism for layoffs and firings) for many larger corporations, including a number that were in the black and were acting “preemptively.” The only thing laborintensive about modern manufacturing is the cost-cutting. Fearing inroads by generic brand companies, Procter & Gamble announced plans in 1994 to eliminate “13,000 jobs (and to close 30 of 147 plants) over a three-year period, while Eastman Kodak intends to cut 10,000 jobs through 1995 as part of its “restructuring.” In the Common Market, unemployment is over 11 percent and in France, with a declining Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it is higher. The global recession has eased but jobs are unlikely to reappear in prerecession plenitude, as the American recovery of the mid-nineties is already proving. Many of the new jobs are lower paying service positions, often without benefits or safety nets. Downsizing is after all a global market strategy responding to the new economics of the automation/electronic information age, and McWorld’s labor market has little interest in employment per se and even less in protectionist governments monkeying with labor supply and demand.
 
There are of course timorous and weak businesses (they hardly meet the criteria of capitalist ventures at all) that, like the ailing unions, welcome the attention of an interventionist government. But they belong more to a vanishing mercantilist economy than to McWorld. In recent decades we have witnessed some of America’s largest corporations seeking succor from the state—Chrysler or Amtrak or the savings and loan industry—demanding the socialization of their risk, so that public taxpayers can pay the costs of their business fiascos. In a world where socialism has disappeared, it can still be found lurking in the boardrooms of failing and bad-risk investment companies like those that misjudged the peso that yearn to spread their losses across the backs of long-suffering taxpayers.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction ..... 3

Part I: The New World of McWorld
1: The Old Economy and the Birth of a New McWorld ..... 23
2: The Resource Imperative: The Passing of Autarky and the Fall of the West ..... 33
3: The Industrial Sector and the Rise of the East ..... 50
4: From Hard Goods to Soft Goods ..... 59
5: From Soft Goods to Service ..... 73
6: Hollyworld: McWorld's Videology ..... 88
7: Television and MTV: McWorld's Noisy Soul ..... 100
8: Teleliterature and the Theme Parking of McWorld ..... 118
9: Who Owns McWorld? The Media Merger Frenzy ..... 137

Part II: The Old World of Jihad
10: Jihad vs. McWorld or Jihad via McWorld? ..... 155
11: Jihad Within McWorld: The "Democracies" ..... 169
12: China and the Not Necessarily Democratic Pacific Rim ..... 184
13: Jihad Within McWorld: "Transitional Democracies" ..... 195
14: Essential Jihad: Islam and Fundamentalism ..... 205

Part III: Jihad Vs. McWorld
15: Jihad and McWorld in the New World Disorder ..... 219
16: Wild Capitalism vs. Democracy ..... 236
17: Capitalism vs. Democracy in Russia ..... 247
18: The Colonization of East Germany by McWorld ..... 260
19: Securing Global Democracy in the World of McWorld ..... 268

Appendix A: Justice-of-Energy-Distribution Index ..... 293
Appendix B: Twenty-two Countries' Top Ten Grossing Films, 1991 ..... 299
Notes ..... 302
Index ..... 363
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