Jihad vs. McWorld (8 page)

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.”
¹⁴

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.
¹⁵
Without even trying, reporter Julie Edelson Halpert gives it concrete meaning in the portrait she draws of Ford Motor Company’s Mondeo project:

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.

Unions too hide behind protectionist policies, trying to insulate their members from the often unfair discipline of international markets like NAFTA. But as Robert J. Samuelson has said, “the drive of big companies to win world markets and maximize sales overwhelms all but the most draconian protectionism.”
¹⁸
Social justice makes little more headway against market ideology than national self-interest. Markets are by their nature unfair, and when confronted with state-generated public interest issues like justice, full employment, and environmental protection they seek above all to be left alone. That is what a market
is:
an unobstructed set of exchange relationships
among individual consumers and individual producers that is allowed to take its course; and McWorld is nothing if not a market. Market proponents insist that, like a river kept from its natural flood plain by engineers bent on containing its occasional rampages, a market hemmed in by government levees and regulatory dams will in the end create far more havoc than one left to follow its own cycles.

Government has a perfect right, indeed it has a duty, to intervene in the economy in the name of justice, ecology, strategic interests, full employment, or other public goods in which the market has and can have no interest. But it cannot expect the denizens of McWorld to welcome such intervention or to demur from trying to obstruct government through their own political interventions. This is the major reason why trade sanctions and embargoes generally fail. Market-driven profit has little tolerance for policy-driven punishment. With the rare exception of a country like Iraq with a leadership so obnoxious that it provokes unanimity among its adversaries and induces national governments to actually prosecute private companies that breach the cordon sanitaire, embargoes are little more than noisy nuisances. South Africa, Serbia, Iran, Israel, Chile, Argentina, and, until recently, even Cuba have at different times weathered embargoes with remarkable equanimity; many have sustained economic growth with the help of market exchanges that simply do not respond to coercive national policies or international law. Even Iraq managed to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity via secret trade well after it had become an outlaw country.
¹⁹

Modern transnational corporations in quest of global markets cannot really comprehend “foreign policy” because the word
foreign
has no meaning to the ambitious global businessperson. Like Gillette Chairman Zeien, they do not find foreign countries foreign: as far as production and consumption are concerned, there is only one world and it is McWorld.
²⁰
How can the physical distinction between domestic and foreign have resonance in a virtual world defined by electronic communications and intrinsically unbounded markets? World trade in 1950 stood at $308 billion. By 1968 it was over a trillion and today it has passed $3½ trillion; meanwhile, tariffs—as potent a symbol of national boundaries as there is—have declined from 40 percent of average product prices to about 5 percent.
²¹
If world trade is comprising an ever greater percentage of world GDP,
currency exchanges are in turn outstripping trade—some say by as much as three to one.

During the 1980s, Japan scoffed at American companies that moved manufacturing facilities overseas to take advantage of cheaper labor, to get closer to markets, and to avoid dependency on an expensive dollar. In the nineties, the Japanese are themselves moving manufacturing outside of Japan. Seventy percent of “Japanese-made” televisions and 30 percent of VCRs are now manufactured overseas. And while General Motors produces over 40 percent of its cars beyond American shores, Toyota’s extranational production is up to 20 percent of its total.
²²
Mabuchi Motors, which controls a remarkable one-half of the world market in those tiny motors that power toothbrushes and zoom lenses and car windows, employs thirty-three thousand workers—but only one thousand of them work in Japan; the rest are offshore foreign laborers at plants in cheap labor markets like China.
²³

Likewise, while it makes sense for nation-states to create incentives for exports and tariff disincentives for imports, corporate producers and individual consumers start from a very different vantage point: literally speaking, producers are universal “exporters” (they export everything they make in their factories “out”) and consumers are universal “importers” (they import from “outside” their home everything they consume); this universalism means in practice that the idea of imports and exports has little or no meaning for market players. The American textile company that moves its factory to Indonesia and, using cheaper labor, sends cheaper dresses back across the border incurs no trade deficit, only greater profitability. The American consumer who purchases that dress does not lose a job, she gains a bargain. Trade deficits belong to nation-states alone. Individual American workers may lose jobs and individual American citizens may have to deal with interest rate changes induced by their nation’s trade deficit, but American consumers and American producers, qua consumers and producers, couldn’t care less.

Of course nobody really intends to segment their being quite so schizophrenically: Americans are job holders as well as consumers, and even in the narrow terms of economic efficiency, their capacity to consume over the long haul depends on secure employment over the long term—and they know it. They are citizens no less than producers
and need to consider the public space consequences of their private sector acts. Market identity is only one fractious piece of a person’s whole identity, which also contains ethnic and civic dimensions that may rival or even be inimical to market identity. The consumer who welcomes lower prices may, as an employee of a textile firm, be hostile to the export of jobs that brought prices down. The producer who profits from the circumventing of environmental regulations may regret as a citizen the damage businesses like his cause to the environment and, as a citizen, support clean air legislation injurious to his business.

Yet full employment and environmental preservation are social goods rather than private-market goods; and the proponents of McWorld view markets and their impact strictly from the one-dimensional perspective of capitalist efficiency. From this constrained, short-term perspective, citizenship, ethnicity, and job status as well as other rival forms of identity are at best irrelevant, at worst, obstacles to be overcome. People and nations may shudder at corporate downsizing policies that result in massive job elimination, but the market will celebrate its players’ new competitiveness.

Nations may have national economic policies but to the true capitalist, regulations, tariffs, bailouts, embargoes, wage restraints, employment quotas, environmentalist restrictions, and even putatively procapitalist incentives or price-fixing schemes are anathema—all equally to be disdained as statist attempts to distort a “natural” process that works properly only when left to itself. Thus the ancient war cry of old and new capitalists alike:
laissez-faire!
Leave us alone! Let us do what producers and consumers do: sell, buy, produce, consume.

These classical doctrines were conceived for a much simpler world and were pushed to the margins by Keynesianism and the welfare state. The modern democratic state is legitimated by the priority of the public over the private, where public goods trump private interests and the commonweal takes precedence over individual fortunes. But under conditions of internationalism—the world trade policies and global markets that constitute what I have called McWorld—old laissez-faire notions reemerge with a new force. For there is no international state and thus no guarantor or discoverer of an international good. The international dis-order remains a kind of state of
nature among nations and it is marked by a “war of all against all”—the “quest for power after power that ceaseth only in death” portrayed by Thomas Hobbes in his
Leviathan
more than three hundred years ago.