Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [76]
In Eastern Europe and Russia, the prospects for literature are even more dismal. Socialist realism was a challenge that sparked a powerful literature of resistance. Commercial realism attests only to the irresistible power of the market. A Russian commentator reports that “publishers—both the old ones who have been freed from the party line yoke, and the new private or joint-stock ones—are not looking for bright and original texts. They are looking for marketable merchandise.”10 Pirated translations of science fiction, detective stories, and erotica flood the bookstalls, driving out local fare other than tepid imitations such as A Book on Delicious and Healthy Food and Sex and a Woman’s Life. In the anarchic Russian economic climate, publishers spring up everywhere (four hundred new ones in the last few years), but reading is in a decline and readers’ tastes are plummeting in almost perfect consonance with the rise of the market. Commerce offers incentives that are even more damaging to literature than the defunct censor’s erstwhile prohibitions. Russia under the tsars and the commissars alike oppressed the body, yet oppression also seemed to feed the soul. Jean-Paul Sartre once remarked that he had never felt so free as under the Nazi occupation. In opposition, literature has a purpose; in the market, it must vie for dollars, appease popular taste, and guarantee profits to publishers. What was the Ministry of Culture under the Soviets has become the Ministry of Culture and Tourism under Yeltsin.
In what was formerly East Germany, a Leipzig distributor responded to the arrival of the free market by burning 10 million inexpensive volumes printed under the old regime, including works by dissident literary figures such as Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf (who fled to Malibu thinking perhaps that it was better to embrace McWorld voluntarily than to be ravished by it against her will). By the lights of McWorld’s videology, commercial book-burnings to raise prices (like the shredding of unsold paperbacks in the West) have nothing in common with book burnings to repress literature (such as the Nazi bonfires of the thirties); but for authors and readers the difference may be hard to discern, and for literary culture, what happened in Leipzig in 1991 may be more fateful than what happened in Leipzig in 1934. In a typically ironic lyric in his poem “The Book Burning,” Bertolt Brecht, finding that he has been left out of the bonfire, implores the incendiaries, “Burn my books too! What is wrong with my books that you are not burning them?!” But what modern author would think that his integrity depended on the demand that his works be relegated to a fire whose object was to raise book prices? In a sad postscript to the Leipzig funeral pyre, the Göttingen Literary Society awarded its “Göttingen Laurels” to the Reverend Martin Weskott for his efforts to save a half million books from “dumpsters and garbage cans” and put them to “the use for which they were intended” by selling them at charity auctions and donating the proceeds to “Bread for the World.”11 Swords into plowshares and words into bread.
If publishing mimics the film industry after which it panders in its globalizing distribution patterns, it also imitates it in its zest for internal monopoly. A free and democratic society depends on competition of ideas and heterogeneity of outlets; yet the number and variety of book, magazine, and newspaper publishing firms has undergone persistent contraction at least since the 1960s while the reach of the remaining monopolies has been globally extended. Ben Bagdikian has been tracking the conglomerating tendencies of media for a number of years, and his statistics point unwaveringly to ever-increasing concentration.12 Bagdikian notes that after World War II, 80 percent of American newspapers were independent; by 1989, 80 percent were owned by chains. In 1981, twenty corporations controlled over half of the nation’s eleven thousand magazines; by 1988 those twenty corporations had become