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Capitalism in the Age of Digital Technology

An old article, but a very interesting one.

“It’s sort of a supreme irony here that we now have the technology such that not that many people have to work and we can produce a lot. We have the technology that would allow us to address the vexing environmental problems with probably far less of a cost than we’re going to have to end up paying. We have the technology so that we could have a much higher standard of living. The output per worker is radically higher than it was fifty years ago. Yet the standard of living for most people is lower. There are endless calls for cutbacks, and stagnation at the same time. This is an enormous paradox, and it’s only understood by understanding the contradictions built into the way capitalism works.”

A fascinating and a deep analysis indeed. However, I suggest that we abandon the dichotomy ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’. They are not two, but one called capitalist democracy.   “This tension between capitalism and democracy,” as McChesney puts it, should be the tension within capitalist democracy. “Those are the problems or contradictions between capitalism and democracy.” It sounds as if the two grew separately.

A fundamental context is absent in the analysis: the context in which a new model of capitalism and how the model generated new monopolies by privatising everything; a decline in the corporate rate of profit; outsourcing and financialization. 'Deregulation' was a result or of the context of the falling rate of profit – a tool to in increase the rate of profit.

“Political democracy has hardly been experiencing a golden age in the U.S. Quite the contrary, ” contends McChesney. “What does make it ‘political democracy’? The lobbies and the pressure groups and the multinationals, the billionaires pouring money, controlling debates and producing narratives for the Republican-Democratic Party in the case of the US? The imperialist wars, the defence of regimes against others,  initiated by that party and backed by lobbyists, including the military industrial complex? A dialectical relationship between the political and the economical means that there is no separation between the two.

“I’m actually a great optimist, I’m actually very hopeful for where we’re going to go in the future with this country. I’m confident democracy.” McChesney does not define the content of this democracy. He mentions Stephen Hawing and who would share the machine-produced wealth, but he does not mention ownership and who should own the means of producing that wealth.

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