4 Quotes by Robert W. McChesney

The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising – all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism – are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop. Any attempt to make sense of democracy divorced from its relationship to capitalism is dubious.

The quasi-mythical competitive “free market” provides an overpowering metaphor for a free and efficient economy, but it has little to do with real-world capitalism. As Charles E. Lindblom put it, conventional wisdom continually “stumbles” and is incapable of grasping capitalism as a system, “because the market’s dazzling benefits half blind it to the defects.

Yale political scientist Robert Dahl asked. “And if citizens cannot be political equals, how is democracy to exist?

Certainly the Internet is changing capitalism in significant ways, and it may well assist those who wish to reform or replace it in the political arena; but it is not making capitalism become, in effect, for lack of a better term, a green, democratic socialist utopia.