Saving Humanity From Market Totalitarianism
By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter
The overwhelming influence of the recent financial turmoil on Wall Street has proven how the world's economies are so interrelated under global capitalism.
Capitalism has long been a companion for many countries in the world. But now the globe is suffering from a direct result of ``totalitarian capitalism'' that is relentlessly tramping down on human thought and values.
Doh Jung-il, emeritus professor of Kyung Hee University and prominent literature critic, talks about what he calls ``totalitarian and barbaric capitalism'' through exploring social, cultural and educational aspects in his new book ``Market Totalitarianism and Barbarism of Civilization.''
There have been several books by Doh and co-authors but this book is his second published on his own in 14 years after the 67-year-old literature critic released a literary critique titled ``A Poet Cannot Go to the Forest'' (1994).
``Reading it again, I found the book is like a spiritual letter to the 21st century,'' he says in the prologue.
Although the five essays were written in the late 1990s with a morbid outlook before the coming of the new millennium, his basic analysis and insights are just as relevant to people living in the 21st century.
At the center of the discussion, he criticizes the market-oriented capitalism deeply rooted in many countries as the first and foremost value. He says that Korean society is now rushing into the cul-de-sac of market totalitarianism.
The term market totalitarianism might sound conceptually inadequate or confusing to readers at first glance. It means that the capitalistic market-oriented system has dominated in the world, leading to a totalitarian way of thinking in which other values that are not profit-first are ignored.
The author says that capitalism and development disguised as ``civilization'' are ironically ``barbaric'' in some sense because the fierce competition, which drives people to harbor a strong desire to win by all means, making them destroy nature and ecology to raise their productivity.
Doh articulates why such society is totalitarian with three reasons. First, it is a mobilizing system that trains and reorganizes people for the market principles. But he says ``while the political totalitarianism is a forcible and oppressive mobilizing system, the market fascism disguises it as autonomy and spontaneity.''
It looks like a voluntary decision of a social member, but it persuades social members to obey and succumb to the system by emphasizing capitalism is the only way to survive.
Second, market totalitarianism is a monitoring system to threaten and control people. The system is also a voluntary monitoring system, which makes people loyal to the ``God of the Market'' and become self-controllers who observe themselves on whether they faithfully follow the market principles.
Third, market totalitarianism paralyzes social rationality. Values that are deemed not helpful to market effectiveness are completely ignored. It also puts more emphasis on functional and profitable values and others are strictly ostracized. ``The public rationality in the market totalitarianism becomes the target of the massacre and paralysis in the same way as the political totalitarianism which devastated social rationality in the past,'' the book says.
He says that such a phenomenon leads social members to suffer from unconditional and unfiltered absorption in cultural and educational sectors that are driven by the market-first system.
At this point, he makes it clear that what he is trying to say is not wholesale denial of either the market or capitalism. Rather he criticizes the totalitarian approach to the market system, which excludes any values aside from profits and capital.
He says when the educational system nurtures human ``machines'' to just make money, literature doesn't fight against such inhumanity, culture is governed by market-favorable by-products and there is no soul-searching, the totalitarian capitalism destroys us.
He asserts that blindness and brutality destroy us as we saw the financial crisis in Korea in 1997. The global economic monoculture outwardly touts differences and individuality but inwardly urges uniformed patterns of consumption. It also proves the self-destruction of the totalitarian capitalism, the professor says.
Then what should we do? Doh says that only critical rationality can control such madness and a civil society can play a role of creating critical rationality.
The author says if Korean society fails to generate people who can take care of the troubled society, there is no bright future.