Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [21]
Certainly the hurried pursuit of free markets regardless of social consequences has put democratic development in jeopardy in many nations recently liberated from communism.26 Social insecurity and rampant unemployment for peoples accustomed to the cradle-to-the-grave ministrations of paternalistic socialist bureacracies are unlikely to convert them to a system of democracy for which they have otherwise had no preparation. This is perhaps why majorities in all but a handful of ex-Soviet lands have been busy reelecting former Communist officials (usually wearing new party labels and carrying new ideological doctrines) to their new democratic legislatures. In economist Robert McIntyre’s blunt words: “Communists and former Communists are winning because the Western economic advice has led to pointless, dysfunctional pain, while failing to set the foundations for politically and socially viable future growth.”27 The right to choose between nine VCR models or a dozen automobile brands does not necessarily feel like freedom to workers whose monthly salaries can hardly keep up with the rising price of bread, let alone to women and men with no jobs at all. Capitalists may be democrats but capitalism does not need or entail democracy. And capitalism certainly does not need the nation-state that has been democracy’s most promising host.
This is not to criticize capitalism in and of itself: joint-stock, limited-liability corporations are quite properly interested primarily in profits and pursue civic liberty and social justice only where they do not interfere with the bottom line. Indeed, they have certain conspicuous virtues beyond their intrinsic economic utilities like efficiency, productivity, elasticity, profitability. They are enemies of parochialism, isolation, fractiousness, and war and are hostile to constraints on economic choice and social mobility, although this hardly makes them friends of justice. Market psychology also can attenuate the psychology of ideological and religious cleavages and nurture concord among producers and consumers, identities that ill-suit Jihad’s narrowly conceived ethnic or religious cultures. But it also undermines the psychology of skeptical inquiry upon which autonomous judgment and resistance to manipulation are founded. In the world of McWorld, the alternative to dogmatic traditionalism may turn out to be materialist consumerism or relativistic secularism or merely a profitable corruption.28 Democracy’s ties to McWorld are at best contingent. Shopping, it is true, has little tolerance for blue laws, whether dictated by pub-closing British paternalism, Sabbath-observing Jewish Orthodoxy, or no-Sunday-liquor-sales Massachusetts Puritanism; but intolerance for blue laws is hardly a condition for constitutional faith or a respect for due process. In the context of common markets, international law has largely ceased to be a vision of justice and has become a workaday framework for getting things done: enforcing contracts, certifying deals, regulating trade and currency relations, and supervising mergers or bankruptcies. Moralists used to complain that international law was impotent in curbing the injustices of nation-states, but it has shown even less capacity to rein in markets that, after all, do not even have an address to which subpoenas can be sent. As the product of a host of individual choices or singular corporate acts, markets offer no collective responsibility. Yet responsibility is the first obligation of both citizens and civic institutions.
While they produce neither common interests nor common law, common markets do demand, along with a common currency, a common language; moreover, they produce common behaviors of the kind bred by cosmopolitan city life everywhere. Commercial