McMAFIA: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE GLOBAL
CRIMINAL UNDERWORLD
By Misha Glenny
There are a lot of things to dislike about the modern capitalist industrial
system - its inequities, its unsustainability, its destruction of the human and
natural environments - but given how a consumer economy operates, it's hard to
complain. There's a reason that abominations like McDonald's exist: people
actually buy those billions and billions of burgers. It's the same global
demand that has led to the growth of the McMafia. And so, for example, if you
want to know why the Balkans have become an "ideal transit zone for illicit
goods and services from around the world" one has to look to "the most
affluent consumer market in history - the European Union":
Organized crime is such a rewarding industry in the Balkans because ordinary
West Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and money
sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes; snorting coke through
fifty-euro notes up their noses; employing illegal untaxed immigrant labor on
subsistence wages; stuffing their gullets with caviar; admiring ivory and
sitting on teak, and purchasing the liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in
the developing world.
The line between an illegal and legal economy can, in other words, be hard to
draw. Who are the real criminals? The Balkan gangsters, or the ordinary West
Europeans? Or, lest we start to feel too smug, the "perhaps millions of
solid, conventional, and often upwardly mobile citizens - lawyer, businessmen,
students, government bureaucrats, politicians, policemen, secretaries, bankers,
mechanics, real estate brokers, waitresses" and others who, according to Time
magazine, made cocaine America's chic drug of choice in the early 1980s. Many
criminal enterprises exist only to feed appetites, and isn't the customer always right?
Black market shopping might even be cast as a patriotic duty:
The main street in the Sao Paulo district, Iphigenia, reveals the
extent to which counterfeit goods are available to the consumer. Outside the
shops, young men stand in front of boards pinned with CD-ROM covers - there is
not a computer program in the world not sold here, all of them pirated, and I am
able to buy for two dollars a copy of the forthcoming Windows OS, Vista, long
before it is available on the licit market. Delighted by my interest, the vendor
starts chanting in Portuguese, "Don't be an American slave, be a patriot
and buy fake goods!" This commercial anti-Americanism helps to sustain
popular support for the trade in illicit goods in Brazil and, indeed, throughout
South America. Other than the police and lawyers involved in the struggle
against piracy, not a single Brazilian to whom I spoke considered the trade
immoral.
And anyone who has downloaded free music, or bought a fake Rolex from a
street vendor, will have a hard time judging them.
McMafia is crime tourism, a globe-hopping expedition through the
world's underground economy. Along the way reporter Misha Glenny develops a pair
of theses: how it is the international demand for illicit goods, especially in
first-world "consumer countries," that is in the driver's seat, and how
it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that was "the single most important
event prompting the exponential growth of organized crime around the world in
the last two decades." The two are related. Consumer countries provided
both the model and the market for the "chaotic scramble for riches and
survival that saw virtually every citizen [of the former Soviet-aligned
countries] sucked into a vortex of violence . . . a deadly environment" run
by "a new class of capitalists." The same process repeated itself in
China, as the tight lid that Mao kept on the triads was released and that new
class of capitalists took over. Capitalists like the snakeheads, who, in turn,
are only feeding the labour market in Europe and North America (consumer
countries consume people, too).
It's all rather depressing. This is what the end of history looks like? A
more intense and violent cycle of exploitation? I find it worth noting that in
his book on the 2008 financial crisis, I.O.U., John Lanchester blames the
slide into unregulated, casino capitalism on the fall of communism too. It seems
that our victory party is coming with a terrible bill.
Notes:
Review first published online August 16, 2010.
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