In the postindustrial age, labor is seen as essentially uninvolved in the social process because there is no need for assertive labor.

With deregulation, one sector of the economy after another is "liberated" to capital's unmonitored authority. The very notion that there is a public interest is contested.

Behind all the hype shaping the electronic highway are corporate interests. These huge companies are doing the most natural thing in the world to them; following their own corporate interest.

Capitalism cannot be reduced to one or a few features, but it does possess one relationship, central to its existence and operation, that constitutes the essence of inequality and ineradicable instability: the wage-labor-capital connection that dwells at the heart of the system.

Though some still see the Internet, for example, as a democratic structure for international individual expression, it is more realistic to recognize it as only the latest technological vehicle to be turned, sooner or later, to corporate advantage - for advertising, marketing and general corporate aggrandizement.

But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system.

The "cumulative effects" of unbridled commercialism, however difficult to assess, constitute one key to the impact of growing up in the core of the world's marketing system. Minimally, it suggests unpreparedness for, and lack of interest in, the world that exists outside the shopping mall.