Systemic Propaganda as Ideology and Productive Exchange

Abstract: Informed by the works of Marx and his progeny (Lukács, Gramsci, Althusser) as well as more recent marxian scholarship, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of ideology and propaganda in the production and circulation of commodities and in the informalization of the contemporary workplace, particularly in the context of the promotional economy, politics, and culture of the United States. The heightened functions of media and communication technologies mark the pinnacle expression of late capitalism—the production, reproduction and colonization of the sphere of consciousness as a necessary condition for the maintenance of the corporate state as it faces its most profound contradictions in production and governance. The central question is whether the present dialectic is leading to a more liberated commons or to a society of exploited prosumers in what Italian Autonomistas call the “social factory.”