Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World

Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World is a book by Benjamin Barber, which examines not only the economic, but cultural and religious aspects of globalization. He proposes one future of "Jihad in the name a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against against every form of interdependence...against modernity itself as well as the future in which modernity issues...[a second] future in shimmering pastels, a busy portrait of onrushing economic, technological, and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and and mesmerize people everywhere with fast music — MTV, Macintosh and McDonald's — pressing together into one homegeneous theme park....caught between Babel and Disneyland, the planet is falling precipitously apart and coming reluctantly together only at the very same moment.

Part I: the New World of McWorld

Virtual corporations are not just trite phrases but a real model, in which the ideal virtual labor is a robot. Full employment may be a national good, but it is not a corporate good. Business efficiency calls for downsizing, replacing permanent workers with temporary workers, robots, and subcontractors.

While firing permanent worker with benefits may have long-term negative benefits in reducing the consumer base, and short-term impacts on government and other sources of social services, most corporations have a short-term focus, and, if cost-cutting makes them more "lean and mean", their leaderships are rewarded.

Workforce cuts, however, are not completely irrational if technology, management methods, and economies of scale make individual workers more productive. Corporations, especially multinational, are simply not part of a social contract.

The Old Economy and the Birth of a New McWorld

A basic premise is that "corporations are today more central players in global affairs than nations." Rather than "multinational", bette terms may be "transnational or postnational or even antinational. For the abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space...their customers...belong to the universal tribe of consumers defined by needs and wants that are ubiquitious, if not by nature than by the cunning of advertising." He later makes the point that the principles of advertising are not limited to corporations.

Many analysts have described al-Qaeda as having a "brand identity", in which "local franchises" conduct terrorism with minimal guidance or no guidance from "headquarters". Mass media are powerful; the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution was prededed by large scale distribution of messages by Ruhollah Khomeini's messages on audiotapes, and then on video. Osama bin Laden is demonstrably aware of the value of television.

Hollyworld: McWorld's Videology

Barber, in this 1995 book, asks if the expiring twentieth century is American, the century of world wars and The Holocaust, and science. "But I nominate celluloid and its baby cousin videotape...this has been the Movie Century, an epoch in which film and video and the images they mediate have replaced print and books and the words the once brokered as the chief instrumentalities of human communication, persuasian and entertainment." Emerging technologies accelerate the effect, but it was a significant event when the newspaper, USA Today, emulated a television format.

Around the world, people watch images that are less and less varied; "nowhere is American monoculture more evident or more feared than in its movies and videos...." controlled by a few global, not purely American, conglomerates. Sony and Rupert Murdoch are world powers. It is to be seen if regionally focused responses such as al-Jazeera establish strong presence both in their region, and in a culturally linked people in a diaspora.

Part II. The Old World of Jihad

Essential Jihad

While this chapter is actually titled "Essential Jihad: Islam and Fundamentalism", it soon draws parallels between Hassan al-Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the cries of Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and the U.S. Christian Right's campaign for a "return to nineteenth century family values — family values understood as direct emanation of church going, school prayer, and a Protestant Christian America." Where the Muslim Brotherhood saw Christian threats, Americans of the 1880s' Know-Nothing movement threats in Mediterranean Catholic immigrants.

Indeed, even the Muslim Brotherhood does not necessarily insist on going back to the 11th to 13th century traditions more attractive to the Taliban.

"If McWorld in its most elemental negative form is a kind of animal greed — one that is achieved by an aggressive and irresistible energy, Jihad in its most elemental negative form is a kind of animal fear propelled by anxiety in the face of uncertainty and relieved by self-sacrificing zealotry — an escape out of history."

Certain Christian Zionist (e.g., Christians United For Israel) groups wage what might be called an indirect jihad, forming Greater Israel in the interest of their beliefs that a United Israel will bring the coming of Jesus Christ.

Returning to a Muslim context, however, Taliban, some strict Wahhabists do desire cultures before the eighteenth century.

Part III. Jihad vs. McWorld

Jihad and McWorld in the New World Disorder

"Markets do not appear, in any obvious way, to be ideal instruments for the regulation or control of public goods, and would-be democrats who look to them as a source of regulatory norms and democratic values would seem to have lost their marbles." Barber poses a question from historian John Pockock: "whether the subordination of the sovereign community of citizens to the international operation of post-industrial market forces [is a] good or bad step in the architecture of a post-industrial politics." Barber answers "Bad. No, not bad. Disastrous."