Monopoly Capitalism and the Culture Industry

Abstract

Up to this point I have only dealt with the specific problems of the Culture Industry at a very superficial level. I previously tried to define the relations between capital, state and information for a given level of abstraction, and especially the contradictions of the capitalist form of information as it can be derived from capital and the capital–state relationship at the same theoretical level. In the previous section I presented what Habermas considers to be the problem in the creation and the contradictions of the bourgeois public sphere, understood as where the contradictions of the information in classical capitalism come about. If this is true, then information would primarily take on a role of articulating the public sphere, ideologically intended to serve capital. However, it is only with monopoly capitalism and especially with the emergence of the so-called Culture Industry that information acquires this special importance in the maintenance of the system, from the point of view of both its ideological reproduction and the accumulation of capital.