Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [143]
The story of the societal malaise occasioned by Russia’s precipitous embrace of raw capitalism can perhaps best be told by narrating in brief what has become a dual attack on the Russian body (and body politic) and the Russian soul. The body politic’s decline is evident both in plummeting rates of political participation and the resurgence of nationalist and neo-Communist anti-Western demagogues among whom Vladimir Zhirinovsky is only the most notorious. The peril to the literal Russian body is still more startling: population statistics reveal a precipitous decline both in birth rates and life expectancy—reflecting a grueling present and a despairing future—while crime has come to stand as a metaphor for both crooked government and corrupt markets and the troublesome relations between them. The Russian soul is at risk because Russian culture and history are being infected by McWorld’s tawdry pop culture and pervasive materialism, the progress of which seems to be the marker of success for the new Russian postindustrial capitalism. Let me say a word about each of these before concluding my review of the Russian example.
The economics of the cold shower has left Russian politics wet and shivering. In the milestone elections held at the end of 1993, the electorate expressed its frustration with the economy first of all by staying away in droves: over half did not vote at all, achieving in their first outing a dismal participation rate it took America two centuries to achieve. Those who did vote vented their resentments by pummeling Yeltsin’s reform party, Russia’s Choice, for which Yeltsin prudently declined to campaign and which received only 15 percent of votes cast. They chose rather to give nearly half of their votes to Yeltsin’s most radical critics: 23 percent to Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist “Liberal Democratic” party, over 12 percent to the newly revived Communist Party, and 8 percent to the Agrarian Party.20 That the Communists should win thirty-two seats so soon after Yeltsin set his tanks on the White House and drove Communist leaders like Rutskoi into the wilderness might seem astounding if it were not for the fact that Communists have either retaken or secured a share of power in all but five of the countries of the ex—Soviet Empire.21 Markets may liberate but what they have liberated in the East has been reactionary resentment.
The Zhirinovsky phenomenon has been sufficiently exploited in the media to merit just a few comments here. Russia’s Choice economic reformer Yegor Gaidar has compared him to Hitler, and there seems considerable evidence for the charge in Zhirinovsky’s autobiographical epic-ette The Last Thrust to the South. Bookstands associated with his party’s office sell Goebbel’s Diaries and Mein Kampf, and both in his writings and speeches he indulges in inflammatory rhetoric on the order of “I may have to shoot a hundred thousand people, but the three hundred million others [in revived greater Russia] will live peacefully.”22 Some observers think he is a symbol of the menace of Russian fascism but not himself a danger (he supposedly has some Jewish ancestors and is a political opportunist of the first order). Too foolish and outspoken, isolated now in a parliament that has been marginalized by Yeltsin and his government, he seems a somewhat less likely candidate for the 1996 presidential race than he once did. But he stands for the possible stillbirth of Russia’s democratic political life, and as such is a warning to optimists. He cannot be said to be a product of markets but he certainly is buoyed up by their devastating effects on many Russians.
The damage wrought by the frenzied transition to capitalism is clear in the body politic, but still more obvious in the vulnerability of the actual Russian body. Environmental depredation, ruinous under communism, continues unabated.23 The people who live in the deteriorating environment are even worse off. Actuarial tables now give Russian men slightly less than sixty years to live, a male life expectancy lower than