Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber

lamented American trade deficit. The 1992 deficit of 40 billion dollars is actually a mean average of a far worse $96 billion
goods deficit
, offset by a $56-billion
service surplus
. In the service sector, the United States has a powerhouse surplus economy. And with world trade in services now estimated at over $600 billion annually, the edge is of growing importance. Advertising exports now rival automobile exports in revenues. Moreover, all these figures are on the conservative side: the Commerce Department admits its traditional “merchandise bias” probably means exports in services are being radically underestimated. 6
    Now critics will point out that even in the service sector where America seems dominant, it leads the world only in the retail sector where Sears and Wal-Mart remain the indisputable giants. In banking and insurance it has been overtaken by others in the top ten category. However, not all service sectors are equal with respect to the emerging postmodern economy of McWorld. From the point of view of the hard economy, banks and insurance companies may seem crucial, but from the perspective of the virtual economy, telecommunications and information along with entertainment predominate; indeed, the first two, if not the third, undergird the real power of the banks and insurance companies. Here the United States maintains an unrivaled and largely unnoticed superiority—with consequences for global democracy that demand careful examination.
    On
Fortune’s
key 1992 list of the one hundred largest “diversified service companies,” eleven specialize in entertainment, telecommunications and information services: of these, eight are American, while only one each is Japanese, British, and Canadian. Of the top one hundred American diversified service companies, only seventeen are entertainment, telecommunications, or information related but these seventeen comprise $140 billion in sales or one-third of the total sales of $421.5 billion for all one hundred companies. 7 One-sixth of the top one hundred companies earn one-third of the revenues. In the followingsection, the predominance of these companies will be shown to be a matter of much more than just revenues.
    Our brief journey from the postwar to the postmodern economy tells a fairly plain story that moves from goods to services, low-tech to high-tech, hard to soft, real to virtual, body to soul. Its lesson for today is that tomorrow’s McWorld will be less about resources than about goods, less about manufactured goods than about goods tied to telecommunication and information; less about goods than about services; less about services in general than about information, telecommunication, and entertainment services; less about software per se than about cultural software of the kind found in images and sound bites being manufactured in advertising agencies and film studios. As we follow this logic and move along the economic spectrum it describes, the United States looks better and better and bigger and bigger and the story of the fall of America from economic grace looks more and more suspect. More important, the consequences of the logic, although good for American economic leadership, are bad for democracy. Nation-state capitalism once contributed to democracy’s founding: today McWorld’s global capitalism may signal its demise.
    Yet the full story remains to be told. Because the new information service economy shapes global marketing and sales, it shapes and indeed constitutes the new ideology of McWorld. Capitalism once had to capture political institutions and elites in order to control politics, philosophy, and religion so that through them it could nurture an ideology conducive to its profits. Today it manufactures as among its chief and most profitable products that very ideology itself. Communism collapsed for internal political and economic reasons, but there were external pressures on it as well. Hollywood and Madison Avenue have made the