Capitalism and the Information Age
edited by Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and John Bellamy Foster
New and expanded essays from a special issue of Monthly Review
ISBN: 0-85345-989-4
$16.00 paper
ISBN: 0-85345-988-6
$43.00 cloth
256 pp.
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“Anyone concerned about the direction the information revolution is taking should read this book. The subjects covered are far-ranging… [The] essays are clearly written, making the book accessible to a broad range of readers. In short, highest recommendation…”
— Choice
“Explains in very concrete terms how the global communication revolution is still firmly controlled by capital, and that the ‘freedom’ of expression we enjoy today is really shaped by a few mega-corporations who own virtually all of the media and entertainment industries.”
— Development in Practice
Not a day goes by that we don’t see a news clip, hear a radio report, or read an article heralding the miraculous new technologies of the information age. The communication revolution associated with these technologies is often heralded as the key to a new age of “globalization.” How is all of this reshaping the labor force, transforming communications, changing the potential for democracy, and altering the course of history itself?
Capitalism and the Information Age presents a rigorous examination of some of the most crucial problems and possibilities of these novel technologies. Taken together, the essays reveal how the new information technologies have been “grafted onto a global capitalist system characterized by vast and growing inequality, economic stagnation, market saturation, financial instability, urban crisis, social polarization, graded access to information, [and] economic degradation…”
Contents & Contributors
- The Political Economy of Global Communication
— Robert W. McChesney - Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?
— Ellen Meiksins Wood - Virtual Capitalism
— Michael Dawson and John Bellamy Foster - Democracy and the New Technologies
— Ken Hirschkop - Global Village or Cultural Pillage? The Unequal Inheritance of the Communications Revolution
— Peter Golding - The U.S. Rules, OK?: Telecommunications Since the 1940s
— Jill Hills - The Privatization of Telecommunications
— Nicholas Baran - Selling Our Children: Channel One and the Politics of Education
— Michael W. Apple - Challenging Capitalism in Cyberspace: The Information Highway, the Postindustrial Economy, and People
— Heather Menzies - Work, New Technology, and Capitalism
— Peter Meiksins - Fighting Neoliberalism in Canadian Telecommunications
— Elaine Bernard and Sid Schniad - Propaganda and Control of the Public Mind
— Noam Chomsky - The Propaganda Model Revisited
— Edward Herman - Information Technology and Socialist Self-Management
— Andy Pollack
About the Editors:
Robert W. McChesney teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy and Rich Media, Poor Democracy (2000, pbk. edition).
Ellen Meiksins Wood is the author of numerous books including The Retreat from Class (1986, winner of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize), The Origin of Capitalism (1999), The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (1991), and Democracy Against Capitalism (1995), co-author with Neal Wood of A Trumpet of Sedition (1997), and co-editor of In Defense of History (1997), and Rising from the Ashes?: Labor in the Age of “Global” Capitalism (1999).
John Bellamy Foster is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Vulnerable Planet (1999) and Marx’s Ecology (2000) and co-editor of In Defense of History (1996).
