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wasnt trying to goad anyone, really--i was curious.
anyway--the problem at this point with collapsing ideology into ownership is that it doesnt let you account for fluctuations in the former---and it doesnt let you think about the complexity of the notion of ownership for publicly held corporations in the context of the international strade in stock, for example. that there would be links between corporate interests and the infrastructure that delivers ideological messages is clear enough--the infrastructure should appear neutral, and legitimates itself through service delivery. the interest in apparent neutrality enables the frame of reference that structures messages within it to fluctuate.
what i found interesting in chomsky is close to what i find interesting in bourdieu's analyses of various media outlets--the outlines of a functioning of hegemony that requires no particular conspiracy---hegemony that articulates and reartucltes its premises through the social conflicts that shape discourse, in the patterns of reproduction of the labor pool, etc. you might say that the present fascism-lite is good for business, but that doesnt let you think about the ways in which that fascism-lite came to be coherent both in itself and for an audience--and if you skip over that, then you undercut the possibilities of a "war of position" as gramsci called it--and if there is a space for a left politics at this point, it would be in war of position.
while i might agree that "in the last analysis" economic interests shape the whole game, it is neither analytically or politically relevant to assume that up front and skip over the modes of social conflict that shape particular contents and the modes of being in the world shaped by them. marxist analysis was dogged by this tendency for the whole of its history.
example: the protection of wealth is equally possible in a context of social-democratic state organization and neoliberal state organization. which option to choose then? that would be a function of the dominant political frame of reference---in a period of transition or uncertainty--and globalizing captialism is certainly both, the reorganization of economic power is unsettling for the holders of capital, as it is for the people who sell their labor power---it makes sense to depoliticize economic relations by privatizing what were previously state functions, say. but that option would not be available had it not been for the thatcher-reagan period and the ideological offensive launched during that period and continued thereafter. between world war 2 and the early 1970s, for example, trade unions were wholly part of the capitalist status quo--now the political situation has been changed and the status of trade unions is problematic at best---so it is politically ok for firms to orient themselves toward locating facilities in the most repressive possible regimes in the interest of the lowest possible costs---the shift is political, not structural--in other words it is a function of a change in the discourse that orders politics, a shift carried out by particular institutions using particular tactics at a particular time--a shift with a history that is interesting in itself. capital does not directly create the ideological framework within which it operates--it is constrained by it.
{there is more to say here, but i am running short of time....sorry)
the power elite--the vance packard term from the 1950s--was tied to particular modes of distribution of economic power--it presupposed a nation-bound trade in stocks, for example.
true left--well, that i sympathize with as a term, but i wouldnt use it myself. i think that the left as a coherent political formation has imploded--it is being followed in slow motion by the right as well---the field is open for rethinking the basic questions that underpinned left politics---which is one reason i am interested in trying to think about questions of cutlural politics (for lack of a better term) in the present situation that does not revert straight away to pinning everything on an abstract notion of ownership. that no existing organizations express the interests of people interested in such a project is no surprise.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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