I'm reading
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal
Underworld by Mischa Glenny. The book is about organized
crime in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, not just in the former
USSR but everywhere, and the book has this really . . . weird
narrative about capitalism. Basically, while describing the horrors
caused by the plutocratic and criminal states that arose post-USSR,
Glenny chalks it all up to the necessary growing pains of an emerging
capitalist society.
The crazy thing to
me is that . . . at the time of this dude writing this book, the
former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries are still total
nutcases. The book was published in '09 and it takes about a year to
go through publication, so it was probably submitted in '08, which
means the bulk of the writing probably went on before the Great
Recession. But it wasn't like '07 was some stellar year in Eastern
Europe.
While it is true
that the criminal elements in Russia are weaker, now, power in Russia
has been replaced with Putin's dictatorship – which one might say
is at least as criminal as the crooks it replaces. And Russia and
most of the Eastern Bloc is experiencing rates of poverty that made
the Soviet Union look downright affluent. Sure, now the stores in
Eastern Europe have stocked shelves . . . but only an incredibly
wealthy elite can buy anything. An improvement for the rich, but not
so much for the tens of millions of Russians cast into abject
poverty. Not to mention the one sterling communist education system
is in shambles (not to mention the flight of the intelligentsia from
Eastern Europe, draining the education system further), lack of
health care where once everyone got it, so forth and so on.
But the most
damning numbers, for me, come from life expectancy.
In Russia, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, men could expect
to live to 72 years of age. It's now . . . 59. Capitalism has
shortened male Russian lives by thirteen years, replacing communist
longevity with violence and alcoholism.
I'm not going to
say that if the USSR had continued to exist that things would be
better than they are, now. There's simply no way to know that. It's
a facile game to make those kinds of predictions. But Russia seems
yet to have repeated real, material benefits of capitalism a full
generation after the fact. There was always an elite who lived
luxurious lives, does it matter if they were communists or
capitalists? It seems to me that it was under the communists that
the Russian state did bettter – lower rates of crime (even
including the state's brutality), longer lives, better educational
and employment opportunities for the overwhelming majority of people.
If Gorbachev had
put his considerable intelligence and energy into invigorating
communism than with perestroika, well, who could possibly say what
would have happened? Perhaps things would have fallen apart even
worse, though I have trouble imagining how without there an all-out
war. But this is what we do know – for tens of millions of people
in the former Soviet Union, life is worse now than then. They have
worse education, often no access to medical care, certainly no form
of retirement. For many others, life is more or less the same in
terms of quality of living. And for a tiny few, things are a lot
better as they are living the capitalist fantasy of tremendous
wealth. You'd think, since this is the case, that maybe constantly
cheerleading capitalist as the means away from poverty might . . .
not be a clever thing to do. There seem to be many more signs that
capitalist is a Russian curse and not a blessing.
But, nope. The
narrative is set. The crime and corruption, and now, I suppose,
tyrannies of the former Soviet Union are the birthing pains of a
better world. Even though those pains seem likely to continue
indefinitely, that the birth may never occur (and, in general, that
kind of dividing line is also facile – at this moment EVERYTHING
CHANGED; usually it was an incremental process that doesn't resemble
the neat narratives of historians and especially journalists). Even
though the gulf between the rich and the poor is literally at the
highest point since . . . the events surrounding the October
Revolution.
Reading the book,
though, it's clear that Glenny has very strong feelings about Russia.
I mean, duh, his name is Mischa. I'm gonna read into things, here,
and say he has a Russian background. When describing the Soviet
Union, though, he talks about how gray and dreary it was. When
describing post-Soviet Russia, well, now it's a very lively place.
I think this is
because for Glenny, it is a far, far more lively place. If you're a
reasonably affluent Western journalist flying into Moscow, I'm sure
that things have improved pretty dramatically for you
in Russia. Glenny says as much, talking about the clubs, cuisine,
girls. What he seems to entirely miss is how, sure, now Eastern
Europe has all of these things, including billionaires, but it has
had a very, very dramatic cost to the people who weren't the winners
of the capitalist lottery.
Not just the
gangsterism (though that is hard to ignore), but the way the former
communist nations have ravaged educational and health care systems.
The way that critical services have been obliterated with no hope in
the next couple of decades of something to replace them. Not to
mention how Eastern European nations, once at full employment, are
now burdened with very high rates of joblessness.
More broadly, there
is this notion that capitalism brings wealth. I've said it before
and I'll say it, again – while it's undoubtedly true that the
richest nations in the world are capitalist, so are the poorest.
Glenny seems to buy into the reasoning that if we only give
capitalism a chance in Eastern Europe, things will get better. It's
only been twenty years!
There are two flaws
in that reasoning that . . . I don't think one can easily dismiss.
The first is that after twenty years, there's no way to say what
would have happened if communism hadn't fallen. Now you're in the
realm of science-fiction, trying to compare alternate time lines. It
has all the difficulty of trying to imagine what would have happened
if the Confederacy had succeeded in gaining independence. Many
interesting scenarios could be imagined, but none of them have the
least basis in fact.
Second and this is
the doozy, there are poor countries that have been both very
capitalist and very poor for a very long time without a lot of hope
of things improving in the near future. While I certainly hope that
Eastern Europe turns itself around, there's no reason why it
shouldn't go the direction Bolivia or Haiti or, well, pretty much all
of Africa.
South America and
the Caribbean are a very interesting test bed. Not only is much of
the area capitalist, it is more conceptually capitalist than places
like the United States. In much of the region, there is almost no
regulation (or if the regulation exists, it's pretty notional with
the states so weak that they can't enforce it – which is why so
much cocaine somehow manages to escape Columbia so consistently). If
you describe a capitalist's idea government, it would sound a lot
like Columbia – where the central government is so weakened that
businessmen can do as they please. And they are. But what doesn't
happen is the wealth is distributed to the poor. Indeed, as the coke
barons grow in power, the lot of people in their territories
diminishes to the point where much of the country is in virtual
slavery. I suspect the only reason it isn't actual slavery is that
if the coke barons owned the workers there might be some sense of
obligation towards the people they oppress.
There's no reason to assume that Eastern Europe won't go in that direction rather than, y'know, becoming a bunch of Japans and South Koreas – the Slavic Tigers. All through South America and Africa are countries with abundant natural resources, countries that are conceptually quite capitalist, but since the minerals extracted from those places enriches foreign companies and a tiny local minority, one does not see a rise in quality of life for the people of those nations. Frequently, they're worse than before, because you have armed thugs demanding that they engage in those businesses (diamond mining, cocoa production) that serve the wealthy elite and their foreign masters instead of businesses that would provide them with a growing economic base (developing local industries, a tax base capable of supporting universal education and health care, stuff like like). There are plenty of examples – the main bulk of capitalist nations, really – that say that the kind of economic chaos that Eastern Europe finds itself can endure . . . indefinitely. Longer than communism, certainly.
But people who
challenge the narrative that capitalism is unvarnished good all the
time don't tend to sell many books.
Also very
interesting is that, in every case the author makes about the rise of
organized crime internationally, is that a big part of it was fiscal
deregulation. Glenny's narrative goes, “Well, you had these
countries like Israel and India with strong collective social
traditions but then deregulation and government privatization came
into vogue and mob violence broke out in a big fucking way.”
So it stands even
more remarkably that such a strange intellectual lacuna should exist
– Glenny repeatedly refers to gangs in the former USSR and Eastern
Europe as providing private security services that the police could
not handle, those necessary handmaidens to capitalism, but the
deregulation and privatization of government that happened in the 90s
and has been one of the persistent goals of capitalism. When they
finally got what they wanted (in part, I feel, because after the fall
of international communism they had no ideological rivals and did not
need to soften their rapacity for fear of a communist uprising in
poor nations), it lead to the Great Recession and a large rise in the
number of gangs and the level of violence. Yet,
at no point does Glenny suggest that maybe this is a structural
problem with capitalism, itself. Which is strange because, y'know,
he does everything by blame capitalism by name – he simply lists
the facts but without the least bit of indictment of the organizing
principle behind those facts. In short that the
deregulation of business and privatization of government has been
driven by capitalism.
If the book took an
entirely apolitical stand – simply describing the facts and letting
the reader infer them – well, I wouldn't like that, either, but at
least it would have the air of neutrality. But Glenny isn't neutral.
He is repeatedly capitalism's cheerleader in a book that describes
the very horrors of capitalism, itself.
He eventually does
mention, briefly, that this crap does threaten the foundations of
globalization. Glenny mentions that everyone knows how money is
laundered and some countries, like the US, could really curtail
money-laundering havens by putting sanctions on those countries, or
the world could get together and create international banking
regulations including the teeth to enforce them.
But licit business
also uses these havens to avoid taxation. There is tremendous
pressure from the business interests that fund elections and control
economies to allow various tax havens – and, thus, money laundering
– to continue.
I think he shies
away from the horror of it, though: the capitalist ethos is
incompatible with any restrictions on what can be commodified or the
manner in which markets are acquired and kept. In the perfect
capitalist world, anything goes. Gangsterism is the fundamental
model of capitalism: anything to make money. That's what they think
they want. Glenny doesn't want to say that, no one does. They have
this fantasy where a system built on human greed and personal
ambition finds some kind of rational boundary. That they will
“learn” to moderate their greed and ambition to avoid the social
chaos created by murder and mayhem as normal business tools. They'll
put them away because it's bad for business.
Sure, it's the
rational actor fallacy, but it's also the capitalist fantasy – that
people will see, as we do, not to do business that way.
I wonder if the
book will move into a discussion of the violence of licit businesses,
y'know, how mining and oil companies are really big on murder and
always have been, not to mention the arms business, or the chocolate
business which is built on slave labor. Not even stuff like the
horrors of forced immigration and the coyote trade, where business
turns a blind eye, but the acts of violence perpetrated by the
businesses themselves. That is what really ties it all into one
package for me – that businesses are quite willing to kill and
enslave quite directly if they can get away with it, in ways no
different from any organized crime ring . . . except, I imagine, a
little more plausible deniability created by a larger number of
intermediaries speaking a more rarified language. You won't catch
too many oil men saying, “Kill that sonofabitch” but merely
opining to their security professionals that it would be great if
that Nigerian tribal lawyer went to a place from which he would not
return. Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest!
While McMafia is an
interesting book, I think it is inherently flawed by the author's
inability to address the structural problems of capitalism even as he
describes many of them. Insofar that the rise of international
gangsterism is linked to capitalism, it is only capitalism's “growing
pains” until the nations that have embarked on this capitalist
adventure learn to deal with their new system of government. This is
true even in countries that have been conceptually very capitalist
for as long as the United States. Because it is Glenny that brings
up capitalism's role in crime, his inability to analyze capitalism
beyond mere boosterism for it rankles quite a bit. To understand
gangsterism requires, I think, an understanding that gangsters are
the epitome of capitalism – everything is a commodity, even life
and death. Slaves are a commodity as are assassins. You sell what
you can, for as much as you can, without any limitation on the
products you sell or the techniques employed to acquire those goods
or secure your markets; violence is certainly permissible. To this
you would need to add the realization that businesses behave in the
same way when they can – that the mobster mentality is alive and
well in corporate boardrooms all across the world who have no qualms
about corrupting governments, using mercenary killer to enforce
company policy, lie, cheat, steal and kill. They can and are doing
all of these things, except they have offices in Maryland. Without
that kind of analysis, the book is entertaining but ultimately
hollow.
No comments:
Post a Comment