Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber Page A

bourgeois revolution practically unnecessary and the proletarian revolution nearly impossible: there are no “workers,” only consumers, no class interests, only a global pop culture that flattens economic contours and levels the spiritual playing field. Television, photocopy and fax machines, international travel, and the ideology of fun guaranteed that failing Communist regimes would expire even more expeditiously. These hard goods are, however, only so many vehicles. What they carry is McWorld’s videology, which belongs not to the goods sector at all but to the service sector.
The Service Sector: Overview
    T HE SERVICE ECONOMY is a strange hybrid, including the oldest and most elementary industries like food delivery, education, and health care but also encompassing new age information and communication technologies that are being invented and introduced almost faster than they can be described. The catch-all service category thus lumps badly paid, nonunion hospital workers and no-future fast-food employees together with computer programmers, airline pilots, and information technicians. It includes commercial banks where Japan has long since seized the advantage from America and Europe as well as entertainment companies where American global leadership is actually growing and seems secure well into the next century. Examining the service sector affords an opportunity to make good on my rhetorical amalgamation of McDonald’s, Macintosh, and MTV—fast food, computer software, and video—by showing how in this sector McWorld manufactures its own specially tailored twenty-first-century videology. When McDonald’s sells
Dances with Wolves
and
Jurassic Park
videos and sundry movie tie-ins in a vague celebration of multiculturalism or environmentalism or extinct reptile preservation, or hires Michael Jordan to link its products to celebrity sport, simple service to the body, I have suggested, is displaced by complex service to the soul. McWorld is a product above all of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form is style, its goods are images. It is a new world of global franchises where, in place of the old cry, “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” is heard the new cry, “Consumers of the world unite! We have everything you need in our chains!”
    In order to focus on McWorld, however, I must first sort out the odd bedfellows who cohabit the generic service sector. There are in fact three powerfully distinctive service subsectors that in many ways are more different from one another than they are as a whole from the natural resource and industrial manufacturing sectors. By the measure of training, income, prospects, and self-worth, a Burger King “cook” hand-grilling mass-produced preformed frozen meat patties has a good deal more in common with a sweatshop seamstress machine-stitching cheap frocks than she does with a computer programmerdeveloping virtual reality arcade games, even though the cook and the programmer are in the service sector while the seamstress is in the manufacturing sector. Distinguished by their varying constituencies, my three candidates for subservice sectors are:
    The traditional service sector, comprising those who serve people directly with traditional food, transportation, health, and housing services, including food preparers and servers, hoteliers and their helpers, airline pilots and train conductors, doctors and social workers, and all others who deliver services directly to the
individual human body;
    The systems facilitation sector, comprising those who serve the infrastructure—the political, economic, and social systems that make modern society possible; these include lawyers, accountants, economists, bankers, insurance people, computer operators, telephone operators, policy specialists, and anyone else who facilitates the operation and interaction of our national and global systems, all those who serve