Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY?
there is hardship among consumers. On the contrary, for those with the wherewithal,
reliance on the store for one’s food and clothes is preferable to the dreary
round of home baking and having to endure ill-fitting and unfashionable clothing.
Similarly, marketisation of information does mean that, so long as one has the
resources to pay, its calibre and the immediacy of access are incomparably
superior nowadays. In addition, compared with the lives of most peasants, even
an impoverished existence inside capitalism offers an enviable standard of living.
Second, the peasantry has been destroyed by various methods. Repression and
dispossession certainly, but probably of more consequence has been the pull of
the market society, offering change and opportunities that the peasant way of life
could never match. Finally, no one should refer to the success of capitalism
without acknowledging the failure of its major rival, communism. Politically
discredited, communism also failed in economic matters, being incapable of
matching the dynamism of the West. Together these are important qualifications
to any account that might imply regret about the triumph of business civilisation.
Nonetheless, what must be accepted is that capitalism has won out, and its
success has meant that the world has been enclosed within its orbit, within
its ways of organisation. It matters not whether one embraces this triumph or
not; the key issue here is to acknowledge it.
I would also emphasise that this success – of what has been called the ‘neoliberal
consensus’, to underscore the ways in which this is the foundational
principle of all governments around the world nowadays – represents no return
to a former capitalist age. Not least, globalisation has ensured that there is no
going back to the days of nineteenth-century laissez-faire. Much of business civilisation
is familiar, and would be recognised by nineteenth-century free traders,
but it is undeniably now in new circumstances. Prominent among these is the
presence of corporations with global reach that, if they are engaged in intense
and rivalrous competition among themselves, exclude from all but the fringes of
activity the small-scale entrepreneurs. Today’s capitalism is one dominated by
huge corporations – the likes of General Motors, Shell, Matsushita and Siemens
– with breathtaking research-and-development budgets, international leverage
and worldwide marketing campaigns. In addition, global capitalism today is
linked in real time by world financial markets – markets which trade in excess of
a trillion dollars every day – the size and speed of which are unprecedented, and
the consequences of which have been evident in massive upheavals of national
economies. Again, today’s capitalism is one which exercises global reach in many
aspects of its operation, as witness the tendencies towards, and practices of, the
world marketing of products, international divisions of labour and creation of
global brands.
While at pains here to emphasise the novel features of the current era, it
seems to me essential that we appreciate that these are consolidations and extensions
of long-established principles. That is, today’s global economy represents
the spread and growth of capitalist ways of behaviour – witness the increased
use of market mechanisms, of private rather than public provision, of profitability
as the raison d’être of organisations, of wage labour, and of the ability-to-pay
principle as the determinant of goods-and-services supply. In short, the ‘global
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