Vol. 66, No. 3: July-August 2014 /
Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age
Robert W. McChesney
https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-066-03-2014-07_1
State Repression, Internet, Media, Political Economy, Movements
The United States came out of the Second World War as the hegemonic power in the world economy. The war had lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression by providing the needed effective demand in the form of endless orders for armaments and troops. Real output rose by 65 percent between 1940 and 1944, and industrial production jumped by 90 percent. At the immediate end of the war, due to the destruction of the European and Japanese economies, the United States accounted for over 60 percent of world manufacturing output. The very palpable fear at the top of society as the war came to a close was that of a reversion to the pre-war situation in which domestic demand would be insufficient to absorb the enormous and growing potential economic surplus generated by the production system, thereby leading to a renewed condition of economic stagnation and depression.… Postwar planners in industry and government moved quickly to stabilize the system through the massive promotion of a sales effort in the form of a corporate marketing revolution based in Madison Avenue, and through the creation of a permanent warfare state, dedicated to the imperial control of world markets and to fighting the Cold War, with its headquarters in the Pentagon. The sales effort and the military-industrial complex constituted the two main surplus-absorption mechanisms (beyond capitalist consumption and investment) in the U.S. economy in the first quarter-century after the Second World War.
This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.
Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
Vol. 66, No. 3: July-August 2014
Please see here for reprint requests.
John Bellamy Foster, "Let Them Eat Pollution": Capitalism and the World Environment , Monthly Review: Vol. 44, No. 8: January 1993
John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, R. Jamil Jonna, The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism , Monthly Review: Vol. 63, No. 6: November 2011
R. Jamil Jonna, John Bellamy Foster, Beyond the Degradation of Labor: Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class , Monthly Review: Vol. 66, No. 5: October 2014
John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, Kipling, the 'White Man's Burden,' and U.S. Imperialism , Monthly Review: Vol. 55, No. 6: November 2003
John Bellamy Foster, Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature , Monthly Review: Vol. 65, No. 7: December 2013
John Bellamy Foster, Intan Suwandi, COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism , Monthly Review: Vol. 72, No. 2 (June 2020)
John Bellamy Foster, Marx and Internationalism , Monthly Review: Vol. 52, No. 3: July-August 2000
John Bellamy Foster, The Fetish of Fordism , Monthly Review: Vol. 39, No. 10: March 1988
John Bellamy Foster, The New Geopolitics of Empire , Monthly Review: Vol. 57, No. 8: January 2006
John Bellamy Foster, Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis , Monthly Review: Vol. 67, No. 2: June 2015
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 > >>